Statistics show that as of October 2006, the percentage of websites hosted on Apache server is 61.64% of all websites. Another interesting statistic is that in the October 2006 survey, the total number of websites reported was almost 98 million sites. This number grew from September to October by 1.08 million.

More amazing statistics on web growth is that the first ten months of 2006 is outpacing the same period for 2005. 2006 added 23.9 millions sites in the first ten months compared with 17.1 million for the same period in 2005. If this growth rate holds in the last two months of 2006, the total sites could top 100 million by the end of the year. Read more on these statistics at http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html.

Enough statistics. We started the statistics discussion to talk about Apache!

Apache server is the leading server for hosting websites on the Net. Second place is Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) at 31.26%. Apache is open source software which means it is free. If you want to download Apache and use it you can do so.

Read the Wikipedia definition of Apache server. The derivation of the name is amusing. The logo for the server is an Indian feather which seems fitting for the name. However, the amusing part is that the development team that built Apache came from another server project. It seems that they collaborated on building Apache, and they did a lot of software patches to the server in the process. You guessed it! They called it “a patchy server”. Hence, the name Apache.

The webmaster for a website uses a “control panel” to interfaces with the Apache server. The format of the control panel interface may vary from web host to web host. Some control panels are text and some are icon based. However, the functions that the control panel provides are the same.

For more information about Apache server, read the detailed article about Apache posted on the Boomer Video eZine at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I27_101306.htm.

Do you know what server is running your website?