Report: Amazon Now World's Largest Web Host

Netcraft said on Tuesday that Amazon reached a significant milestone in September, as it became the world's largest hosting location with 118,000 web-facing computers. Previously, China Telecom held that title, playing host to a smaller 116,000 farm of web-facing computers.

"Amazon has nearly doubled its count of web-facing computers within the past year, and this growth does not look set to slow down any time soon," Netcraft reports. "The majority of these computers are located in the U.S. (77-percent) and Ireland (13-percent), although smaller numbers of servers have started popping up in other locations within the past year, including the Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, and Japan."

Despite the large number of web-facing computers in Amazon's fleet, they're reportedly used to host only a "moderate" sum of 6.8 million websites. 2.9 million of these sites are served by nginx, followed by 2.3 million served by Apache. Trailing those are 410,000 websites served by Polyvore Web Server which resides within the Polyvore fashion social-commerce network. Only 163,000 sites in the entire Amazon collective are running Microsoft IIS.

"Although Amazon's scalable, pay-as-you-goEC2 service supports Microsoft Windows, Linux is by far the most popular operating system to be found amongst all of its web-facing computers, including those used by CloudFront and S3," Netcraft reports. "Nearly 97-percent of Amazon's web-facing computers were running Linux during September's survey."

In addition to observing Amazon's web-facing computers, the firm said it only received responses from 620,132,319 sites, a decrease of 8 million sites since last month's survey. A large portion of this drop was caused by a large network of linkfarmed domains disappearing from under the .com TLD. This caused Apache numbers to suffer the most, with a loss of 10 million sites, thus dropping Apache's market share to 58-percent.

In addition to Apache, Google reportedly saw a loss of 1 million sites since the last survey. However both Microsoft and nginx saw a gain in September, taking on 840,000 and 1.5 million new domains respectively.

"Server headers for IIS 8.0 – the latest version of Microsoft's server software – were returned by 1,723 sites this month," the report states. "This is an increase of 1,445 sites (+519%) over the six months since the public beta release of Windows Server 2012 in April, which uses IIS 8.0 as its default web server. However, only twelve of the million busiest sites were found to be using the software, seven of which are within Microsoft's own iis.net."

The full report, including several charts, can be read here.

Kevin Parrish is a contributing editor and writer for Tom's Hardware,Tom's Games and Tom's Guide. He's also a graphic artist, CAD operator and network administrator.

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