Ubuntu more popular than Red Hat and SUSE on servers

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/16/ubuntu_gaining_ground_in_web_servers/

In figures compiled on Thursday, 7 per cent of all the world's web servers were found to be running Ubuntu, up from 5.5 per cent the previous year.

Although that might sound like a mere drop in the bucket, it's actually a very solid showing. By comparison, just 3.4 per cent of web servers were running Red Hat; 1.2 per cent were running Red Hat's community-maintained cousin, Fedora; and a mere 0.8 per cent were running Suse.

 

That's a misleading title. It's only specifically related to one facet of computing. There are many other uses where the solid enterprise versions reign surpreme in absolute numbers.
Mrk

 

Agreed but the fact that a distro like Ubuntu which by so called anal Linux purists is always invariably poo-poohed can even come to this level is a remarkable achievement in itself. This goes to show that due to its friendly nature, easier to setup and excellent update and support, many offices including the ones my firm deploys prefer Ubuntu over other versions of Linux. Maybe there is something to learn from Canonical for others.

 

Statistics that was completely ignored in that article yet are rather important:

-the amount of traffic these web servers see. I'm willing to bet a lot of money that the high-traffic servers of the world are using RHEL.

-what OS corporate owners choose.

-how many of those web servers are just Joe Schmoe running a blog that no one reads. Of course those are going to be free & opensource servers.

Without those statistics, you can't really draw any meaningful conclusions about the popularity of Linux.

 

Also not clear how they are managing to get work out what a unique server is, hints that they simple counted sites (so a server hosting loads of parked domains with placeholder pages will count highly) and of course no way to tell when a single site is using more than one server as you will only get one public IP address at a time.

I do know amongst my Web developer friends and forums I visit that Ubuntu has a good reputation for use on current cloud solutions, which could we be a factor in its rising popularity.

 

Which reminds me, it takes about 10 clicks and 5 minutes to spin up a server in the Amazon Cloud. They've got preconfigured servers in just about every flavor ready to be deployed. I wonder what that does to the statistics.