Most popular websites 6 out of 7 powered by GNU/Linux - concludes survey

Pingdom - an uptime monitoring company conducted a survey recently where it researched the technologies that power 7 most popular websites namely -

• Techcrunch - A blog maintained by Mike Arrington which is dedicated to profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.
• FeedBurner - a provider of RSS feed management for bloggers and other online news sources and which is currently offering more than 566,000 feeds from more than 334,000 publishers.
• iStockPhoto - An online, royalty-free stock photo provider.
• YouSendIt - A service allowing its users to move and share large files with others over the Web instead of sending them over email. The service has more than 3 million registered users and transfers more than 1 million files daily.
• Meebo - This is an in-browser messaging application supporting a variety of messaging applications such as Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, AIM and Jabber. Meebo users exchange more than 70 million messages every day.
• Vimeo - claims to be one of the most popular video sharing sites; next to youtube that is. And lastly ...
• Alexaholic - This popular site uses data from Alexa to display web traffic trends. Here you can compare and analyse one site's statistics with another.

While I do not believe these are the most popular sites (obviously there are more popular websites), these are indeed very popular and enjoy a large group of followers.

These are the findings of the survey.

1. All these websites except Alexaholic, exclusively use Linux as their choice of OS. Alexaholic is hosted on Windows.
2. Barring Meebo and Alexaholic, all the rest use Apache web server to serve their web pages. Meebo uses lighttpd - an alternative open source web server and Alexaholic uses IIS.
3. All the seven websites exclusively use MySQL as their database.
4. These are the number of web servers each of the sites employ:
   
   • Meebo - Greater than 40 Nos
   • Yousendit - 24 Nos
   • Alexaholic - 2 Nos
   • Techcrunch - one
   • FeedBurner - 2x70 - 140 Nos
   • iStockPhoto - 15 nos
   • Vimeo - 4 Nos
5. The most popular server side scripting language is obviously PHP with 5 of them developed using it.

In all, the survey provides details related to web servers, database servers, network hardware, storage servers, site usage and some miscellaneous data. You can read the detailed result of the survey here.

One thing worth noting is that none of them use FreeBSD which is claimed to power many high traffic portals including Yahoo. The reason provided is that many Linux distribution companies such as Red Hat and Novell provide standardization, and more importantly support not available on the same level in FreeBSD.