Servers With GNU/Linux and Microsoft's Continuing Strategy of Gaming the Numbers by Taking Over Parked Domains

Amazon's cloud business quietly just took a big step outside the cloud.

Last month, soon after Amazon Web Service's giant tech conference, the company started offering its enterprise customers a new version of the Linux operating system it calls Linux 2. The new product marks a departure for the cloud-computing juggernaut, as the software can be installed on customers' servers rather than run from Amazon's data centers.

Amazon will rent access to Linux 2 to its cloud customers. But it's also making the software available for companies to install on their servers. There they can use it to run many of the most popular server software programs and technologies, including Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware, Oracle's VM VirtualBox, Docker, and Amazon's Docker alternative, Amazon Machine Image.

The noticeable spike in Apache-powered domains in May 2013 was caused by the largest hosting company of the time, GoDaddy, switching a large number of its domains from Microsoft IIS to Apache Traffic Server (ATS) . GoDaddy switched back to using IIS 7.5 a few months later.

Today, Apache still has the largest market share by number of domains, with 81.4 million giving it a market share of 38.2%. It also saw the largest gain this month, increasing its total by 1.53 million. This growth was closely followed by nginx, with a gain of 1.09 million domains increasing its total to 47.5 million. While Microsoft leads by overall number of hostnames, it lags in 3rd position when considering the number of unique domains those sites run on, with a total of 22.8 million.