Who is the most popular Linux web server

CentOS is not a popular Linux distribution, and there is no particularly good ranking in the rankings of various popular Linux distributions; CentOS is also a distribution with no personality at all. —— It is exactly the same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

However, in the Linux running as a web server, CentOS is No. 1 without any suspense. According to data from foreign technology website w3techs, as of July 28, 2010, CentOS topped the list of Linux Web servers with a share of 31.6%, followed by Debian and Red Hat. That is to say, in every ten Linux-based Web servers, there are three CentOS, two and a half Debian and one and a half RHEL. (There is also a Ubuntu, which is also a trend worthy of attention.)

Linux Web server market share (W3Techs stats) from October to October 2009

Running before 51CTO In the mainstream and non-mainstream Linux on the Web server, these three are also the top three mainstream distributions. Among them, Red Hat is developed and provided technical support by Red Hat, and Debian and CentOS are maintained by the community.

As we mentioned before, CentOS is a clone of RHEL. The only difference is that companies using RHEL need to pay for Red Hat to use, and can get paid service and technical support and version upgrades. Instead, CentOS can build a Linux system environment like RHEL, but does not need to go to RedHat. Any paid fees will also not receive any paid technical support and upgrade services.

In a nutshell, companies that use CentOS are generally professional Linux users who don't need Red Hat support. Of course, we need to know that the company that provides CentOS support services is not without, but at present it is not the selling point of CentOS.

Reasons for CentOS Popularity

Why do companies prefer to choose CentOS without technical support instead of choosing a strong technical background and support for secure Red Hat? The first reason is of course cost. In the United States, the price of Red Hat is about US$1,000 per server per year. In China, for large-scale enterprises, this price is even higher than tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan per server per year. This is not the willingness of ordinary companies. Beared.

On the other hand, CentOS is very popular in the data center because it is very easy to set up, very easy to maintain and manage, and very fast.

In addition to CentOS, Oracle's Unbreakable Linux is an equivalent option. However, we should still note that once you use a distribution like CentOS, it means that all technical problems need to be solved by your own professional technicians. If your site scales quickly, or if you can't solve your technical problems for any other reason, then you might want to consider options like Red Hat (see reading: From the CentOS storm: How to choose Linux Enterprise Edition?) .

Finally, let's take a look at some of the details of w3techs statistics:

◆The increase in CentOS's market share is mainly from Red Hat and Fedora, but at the same time, some shares are also Replaced by Ubuntu.

◆CentOS is used relatively rarely in large enterprises, mainly distributed on most small and medium-sized sites.

◆The main server used on CentOS is Sun's server technology. Very few use of Nginx

◆CentOS has a relatively high market share in Japan, Spain and Romania, and relatively low in Germany, China and Brazil