report from Netcraft shows that thousands of websites are still hosted on web servers that are running Windows XP, and many of these belong to governments from across the world. If ever there was a bigger recipe for disaster, I know not of it. More than 6,000 large websites are confirmed to be powered by the operating system that launched all the way back in 2001. Interestingly, a third of them are located in the US, and only 3 percent of these are in China. Out of these, at least 14 of these servers host US government sites, including the webmail system of the government of Utah. Real bad news! But make way for worse news, then. The study further reveals that nearly 500,000 websites are powered by Windows 2000 — yes, the operating system that has not received an iota of support from Redmond since the year 2010. These installations are using Microsoft IIS 5.0 web server, while Windows XP machines are running Microsoft IIS 5.1. But that’s not all. The survey found that 50,000 websites are hosted by Windows NT 4.0. My, my! This is an operating system that Microsoft stopped supporting all the way back in 2004. Luckily, the report says that 75 percent of these sites are hosted on one computer in Norway. A single ten year old web server hosting at least 37,500 websites. What is the world coming to!]]>
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I hope most of these websites are just domains that aren’t being updated at this point. If not, that’s a little scary!
US Gov’t Sites!!! Without security. This has to be cause for concern, right??
You’re right. With security ending, this is a scary, scary thought. Our government needs to keep up with technology if not stay ahead of it!
Will be using XP for the next 10-15 years! Nothing runs .NET 3.5 apps as fast as XP, not even .NET 3.5 in Windows 7, nor .NET 4.5 in Win8! (P.S. We’re not talking about a few percentages increase in speed, we’re talking about multiples, ie. 2-7X faster, when graphics-intensive .NET app are ran in XP!)
That’s the first I’ve ever heard of anyone having a performance dip on 7 and 8
It just shows that in among all the web servers, XP web servers are not the worst.