Jul 12, 2004 : Red Hat Linux Leads, Netcraft Says

📅 July 12, 2004 - According to research and analysis firm Netcraft's (netcraft.com) hosting provider switching analysis, Red Hat is the leading Linux distribution on the Internet, holding a 49.8 percent share of the market. Over the last six months, Red Hat has lost 1 percent market share but still had a six-month growth rate of 10.1 percent. Red Hat runs on 1,465,310 hostnames, according to Netcraft.

Linux Cobalt and Linux Debian occupy the second and third highest shares of the market. Cobalt holds a 20.3 percent share, growing at a 13.3 percent rate in the last six months. Debian holds a 15.9 percent share and grew at a rate of 14.5 percent over the same period.
Suse, Mandrake and Gentoo hold the fourth, fifth and sixth highest distributions of Linux. Suse, according to Necraft, has a market share of 11.8 percent, while Mandrake and Gentoo hold 1.3 and 1.0 percent respectively. Gentoo had the highest percentage growth rate of all six distributions of Linux ? at 49.5 percent.
Netcraft said the gains made by Debian, Suse and Gentoo were helped by the growth of the hosting market in Europe. It said these distributions also got new attention because of the many changes taking place at Red Hat and reassessments, by companies, of the economics of Red Hat.
Red Hat remains popular with dedicated hosting providers such as EV1Servers and Rackspace, Netcraft said. Affinity and Interland reduced their use of Red Hat. Both have significant shared hosting operations.