The survey conducted by NetCraft Inc., of Bath, England, does not take into account servers hosting intranets behind firewalls. Nevertheless, Apache's user list is impressive. McDonald's, UUNet Technologies Inc., HotWired, Yahoo Inc., JavaSoft, CBS and the FBI are among the 400,000 sites running Apache. Each site puts Apache through performance-intensive operations. In the process, it has won over some Netscape customers.
Service providers are as impressed as content suppliers.
Users also are enamored with the server's flexibility. The source of Apache's power is no secret. The resulting upgrade of NCSA's httpd 1.3 was thereafter known as A PAtCHy server. We just found each other over the Internet. While Apache has seen phenomenal success, even its biggest supporters admit that it's not for the faint of heart.