I highly doubt those stats are accurate.

    > Unix is used by 67.1% of all the websites.
    > Linux is used by 35.9% of all the websites.

This adds up to 103% so I guess Linux is included under Unix? That means 31.2% of servers are running a non Linux Unix? Seems a bit high...

The wording on the site is bad. That is supposed to represent 35.9% of the sites that are hosted are using Linux. Linux is considered a sub-category of Unix on w3techs.

See also: http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-unix/all/all

45.2% of UNIX web servers are of an "unknown" variant? How can you detect "UNIX" but not be able to have any idea of what UNIX it is? I'm going to hazard a guess that you'd be able to get numbers of similar accuracy by inspecting /dev/random.

Edit: poking around the site a bit more, I notice that they count Darwin under UNIX but OS X is a separate top-level category alongside Windows and UNIX (albeit one with less than 0.1% share). WTF are they doing? This makes no sense.

Technically you could run a non-OS X Darwin. Maybe that's the explanation?

Could be, but it still doesn't make sense. It's the same underlying stuff, so either they're both UNIX (what I'd vote for) or neither is.

I never said it made sense ;-)

I didn't mean to implicate you in this. I just checked out the site and had to share how ridiculous it is.

We use Ubuntu because our cloud provider supports it and doesn't support Debian (though we could probably hassle them into doing so if we really wanted to push it).

A cloud provider who supports Ubuntu and not Debian almost certainly doesn't know what he's doing; I'd consider it a warning sign, although not an outright disqualifier.

Your cloudiness may vary. This was the place we used to have a lot of hosted boxes with, they treat VMs much like they used to treat the hosted boxes.

We are in fact leaving them by the end of 2014, er the end of 2015, er some time in 2016. (It turns out disentangling years of encrusted dependencies is complicated.)

But in practice, Ubuntu is a perfectly good version of Debian for our purposes, so we'll probably stick with it. The devs also like it on their desktops so feel happier targeting the same thing on the server.

Could you explain why you think so?

If you support Ubuntu, it's trivial to extend that to Debian. Ubuntu is still very tightly pinned to Debian.

That's not true for the kernel, which is probably one of the most important parts for a virtual server provider, if they want the instances to run as efficiently as possible.