4 ms·

What would you recommend as a better source?

by EGreg 4y ago

pier25 4y ago
There's no good source on back end tech market share. The simple truth is that there's no way to know what a server is running unless the server lets you know.
- viraptor 4y ago
  I'd say instead that there's no guaranteed way. There are likely markers though. For example if you navigate the website and get a cookie set with name "..._laravel", you can safely assume it's a PHP app for stats purposes. There are also more subtle things like the format of csrf, format of error responses, behaviour for weird data passed in (especially name[]=value), etc.
  - ev1 4y ago
    PHPSESSID :)
    - md5madman 4y ago
      only if the site started a session
  - pier25 4y ago
    Indeed, but that's not really a good source to estimate market share as there will be a strong bias towards stacks that are more conspicuous.
phillipseamore 4y ago
There simply isn't any source. Headers can be removed or they can be modified to say a site is using X when it really uses Y. Any other detections have just as many problems, having files ending in php doesn't mean they are php, even a site that has something like phpversion.php could be just a saved HTML copy. The biggest PHP users on the linked list don't even expose that they use PHP, but it is publicly known (though Facebook uses [or used] their own fork of PHP called HHVM).
ev1 4y ago
There isn't one. PHP stopped sending X-Powered-By by default years ago.
cestith 4y ago
A more reliable source would be a well-conducted survey. Or, honestly, having worked for one of the big shared hosting providers, by the numbers small sites outnumber big sites to a staggering degree. One could get a pretty representative sample of overall share by asking the huge providers what appears to run the sites hosted on their services by percentage. I have no particular reason to doubt more than half of sites are run by PHP considering the portion of sites that are WordPress. However, I also have no particular reason to trust that 77% is an accurate proportion.

What would you recommend as a better source?

by EGreg 4y ago

What would you recommend as a better source?

There's no good source on back end tech market share. The simple truth is that there's no way to know what a server is running unless the server lets you know.

viraptor 4y ago
I'd say instead that there's no guaranteed way. There are likely markers though. For example if you navigate the website and get a cookie set with name "..._laravel", you can safely assume it's a PHP app for stats purposes. There are also more subtle things like the format of csrf, format of error responses, behaviour for weird data passed in (especially name[]=value), etc.
- ev1 4y ago
  PHPSESSID :)
  - md5madman 4y ago
    only if the site started a session
- pier25 4y ago
  Indeed, but that's not really a good source to estimate market share as there will be a strong bias towards stacks that are more conspicuous.

phillipseamore 4y ago

There simply isn't any source. Headers can be removed or they can be modified to say a site is using X when it really uses Y. Any other detections have just as many problems, having files ending in php doesn't mean they are php, even a site that has something like phpversion.php could be just a saved HTML copy. The biggest PHP users on the linked list don't even expose that they use PHP, but it is publicly known (though Facebook uses [or used] their own fork of PHP called HHVM).

ev1 4y ago

There isn't one. PHP stopped sending X-Powered-By by default years ago.

cestith 4y ago

A more reliable source would be a well-conducted survey. Or, honestly, having worked for one of the big shared hosting providers, by the numbers small sites outnumber big sites to a staggering degree. One could get a pretty representative sample of overall share by asking the huge providers what appears to run the sites hosted on their services by percentage. I have no particular reason to doubt more than half of sites are run by PHP considering the portion of sites that are WordPress. However, I also have no particular reason to trust that 77% is an accurate proportion.