Netcraft
More info
- Released
- 1995
- Type
- Internet measurement and anti-phishing
- Website
- netcraft.com
A British company from Bath that has counted web servers every month since 1995, which made it the referee everyone quoted when they happened to be winning.
The Netcraft Web Server Survey began in August 1995 and works by asking every site it can find what server it runs. The resulting curves became the industry scoreboard: Apache versus IIS for two decades, then nginx and Cloudflare. Whoever was ahead that month put the numbers in a press release.
On Slashdot, "Netcraft confirms it: BSD is dying" became a standing troll, mocking how readily the survey got used as a death certificate. Commercially, Netcraft now earns most of its money finding and taking down phishing sites for banks and governments. BSD, for the record, is still alive.