PHP just grows & grows | Netcraft News – Netcraft

Netcraft began its Web Server Survey in 1995 and has tracked the deployment of a wide range of scripting technologies across the web since 2001.
One such technology is PHP, which Netcraft presently finds on well over 200 million websites.

The first version of PHP was named Personal Home Page Tools (PHP
Tools) when it was
released by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. PHP
1 can still be downloaded today from
museum.php.net. Weighing in at only 26 kilobytes in size,
php-108.tar.gz is
diminutive by today’s standards, yet it was capable of allowing users to
implement guestbooks and other form-processing applications.

PHP 2 introduced built-in support for accessing databases, cookie handling,
and user-defined functions. It was released in 1997, and by the following year,
around 1% of sites on the internet were using PHP.

However, PHP 3 was the first release to closely resemble today’s incarnation
of PHP. A rewrite of the underlying parser by Andi Gutmans and Zeev
Suraski led to what was arguably a different language; accordingly,
it was renamed to simply PHP, which was a recursive acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.
This was released in 1998 and the ease of extending the language played a large
part in its tremendous
success,
as this aspect attracted dozens of developers to submit a variety of modules.

Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski continued to rewrite PHP’s core,
primarily to improve performance and increase the modularity of the codebase.
This led to the creation of the Zend Engine, which was used by PHP 4
when it was released in 2000. As well as offering better performance, PHP 4
could be used with more web servers, supported HTTP sessions, output buffering
and several new language constructs.

By September 2001, Netcraft’s Web Server Survey found 1.8M
sites running PHP.

PHP 5 was released in 2004, and remains the most recent major version release
today (5.4.11 was released on 17 January 2013). Zend Engine 2.0 forms the core
of this release.

By January 2013, PHP was being used by a remarkable 244M sites, meaning that 39% of
sites in Netcraft’s Web Server Survey
were running PHP. Of sites that run PHP, 78% are served from Linux
computers, followed by 8% on FreeBSD. Precompiled Windows binaries can also be
downloaded from windows.php.net, which has helped
Windows account for over 7% of PHP sites.

Popular web applications that use PHP include content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal,
along with several popular ecommerce solutions like Zencart, osCommerce and Magento.
In January 2013, these six applications alone were found running on a total of 32M sites worldwide.

PHP also demonstrates a strong installation base across web-facing computers that are found as part of
Netcraft’s
Computer Counting survey.
Just as an individual IP address is capable of hosting many websites, an
individual computer can also be configured to have multiple IP addresses. This
survey allows us to identify unique web-facing computers and which operating
systems they use regardless of
how many sites or IP addresses they have. As of January 2013, 2.1M out of 4.3M web-facing computers are running PHP.

PHP has also become a victim of its own
success in some respects: With so many servers running PHP, and with so many
different web applications authored in PHP, hackers are presented with a huge
and rather attractive attack surface. Because it is so easy to get started with
programming in PHP, it attracts all levels of developers, many of whom may
produce insecure applications through lack of experience and attention to detail. Netcraft’s
anti-phishing services find wave upon wave of phishing attacks hosted on compromised PHP
applications, and the U.S. NVD (National
Vulnerability Database) contains several thousand unique vulnerabilities that
relate either to PHP itself, or to applications written in PHP.

Methodology

The full list of hostnames from the Netcraft Web Server Survey forms the
basis of our technology tracking. We make requests to each of these sites, or if
there is a large number of sites hosted on a single IP address, we employ a
proportional sampling technique. The content of
each page and its HTTP headers are analysed to determine which technologies are
being used. For
PHP, we look for references to .php filename extensions or
the existence of HTTP response headers like “X-Powered-By: PHP”.
Additional signature tests are used to identify particular PHP applications,
such as WordPress.

Each metric is then calculated as follows:

Hostnames

For each IP address, we estimate the total number of PHP sites it serves by
calculating the product of the proportion of sampled hostnames that are running
PHP and the total number of hostnames on that IP address. In cases where the IP
address is serving 100 or fewer sites, all sites will be sampled and thus be
representative of the entire population for that IP address.

Active sites

To provide a more meaningful metric which counts the number of human-generated sites
actively using PHP, our active site count excludes spam sites or other
computer-generated content. This methodology is described in more detail here.

IP addresses

This metric counts the number of unique IP addresses where at least one
hostname in its sample set was found to be running PHP.

Computers

A single physical or virtual computer may have more than one IP address.
We are able to identify unique computers that are exposed to the internet
via multiple IP addresses. If an IP address is running PHP, then the computer
associated with it is marked as running PHP. Further details of this methodology
are explained in our
Hosting
Provider Server Count.

Source: https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/01/31/php-just-grows-grows.html