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Shining a LAMP on Web 2.0
February 26, 2007

Uptime monitoring firm Pingdom has done a small survey of some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites on the Internet to see what is running under the hood that keeps the web sites going.

The results are a fairly conclusive vote of confidence in the LAMP stack: six out of the seven businesses queried are running Linux and MySQL, five are using Apache, and five are using PHP.

Pingdom surveyed Techcruch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo, and Alexaholic. A write up of the results is here while a PDF of the results can also be found here.

As Pingdom reports:

“Linux rules the game with these sites. All except one use Linux exclusively, with Alexaholic being the standout since it’s hosted on Windows.”

"With Linux hosting comes the common use of the Apache web server. It’s by far the most deployed web server on the Internet with a 58.7% market share (Netcraft), so it’s only natural that it would also be used by a majority of the sites in the survey.”

“With open source ruling the game it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the database of choice for all but one of the sites is MySQL, the ultra-popular Swedish open-source database.”

“Just like Apache is the most common web server software, PHP rakes in another “win” for open source when it comes to server-side scripting languages.”

In fact, given the results, the bigger question is not ‘why are these organizations using LAMP?’, but ‘why are a couple of them not?’.

Meebo is using the lightweight server Lighttp rather than Apache, as do the likes of YouTube and Wikipedia, and primarily uses C/C++ as a server-side scripting language.

The biggest stand-out is Alexaholic, which uses ASP.NET 2.0 on Windows with Internet Information Server (IIS) together with Microsoft SQL Server.

“Ron Hornbaker, the man behind Alexaholic, cites his familiarity with the .NET platform as the main reason for his choice of platform,” explains Pingdom. “‘I’m most comfortable coding with C#.NET, and this was a personal project,’ he says. Ron Hornbaker built the first version of Alexaholic in just one (admittedly intense) weekend, which can definitely be seen as proof that the ASP.NET environment can be very productive.”