The Apache Web Server Project is now 10 years old, as noted over the weekend by Roy Fielding, a co-founder of the open source development project. “Ten years ago today, the Apache Group decloaked with the creation
of the new-httpd archive and initial accounts on hyperreal.org,” Fielding noted on the apache-httpd-dev mailing list.

Apache hit another milestone earlier this month when our Web Server Survey found 40 million sites now running on the Apache server, which powers nearly 70 percent of web sites.

Apache was detected on 658 sites in the initial Netcraft survey in August 1995, just six months after the project’s launch, when its 3.5 percent market share was dwarfed by software from NCSA (57 percent) and CERN (19.7 percent). The Apache server reached 10 million sites in June 2000, 20 million in November 2001 and 30 million in November 2003.

In an interview with Netcraft last year, Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf assessed the remarkable growth. “I imagine most of the growth continues to be either with the small mom-n-pop companies, or web hosting ISPs, or internationally – all places where price sensitivity is high, where the economic downturn is still causing budgets to be hurt, and there’s willingness to consider an Open Source approach to solving a given problem,” said Behlendorf. “I imagine the rise of related Apache projects, like the continued rise in use of mod_perl and Tomcat and our friends over at PHP, have only increased the confidence in using the web server for mission-critical situations.”