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A survey by Pingdom of seven heavily visited websites found plenty of Apache web servers and PHP coding on their platforms, where Linux carries the platform and MySQL handles the database needs.

Some interesting observations came to the people at uptime monitoring firm Pingdom.

They managed to get seven noteworthy websites to agree to share some details about their infrastructure.

None of them seemed willing to part with an administrator password, oddly enough.

The websites surveyed for the report: TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockphoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo, and Alexaholic.

They were nearly unanimous with their choice of database backends.

MySQL owned the field, as six of seven sites said they use it. All but Alexaholic run MySQL on Linux; Alexaholic uses Microsoft SQL Server on Windows.

To get pages to their web visitors, five of the seven sites chose Apache, as have the bulk of other websites on the Internet.

Alexaholic runs IIS on Windows, while Meebo has tapped relative newcomer Lighttpd, called 'Lighty', for their web serving requirements.

Except for Alexaholic, the other webservers all run on Linux.

“Lighttpd tends to work really well with AJAX-based sites like ours,” said Simon Yeo, director of operations at Meebo, in the blog.

Lighttpd also boasts usage at big-time sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia.

PHP has a place on five of the seven sites, either on its own or in conjunction with other languages like Perl or Java.

Alexaholic's Ron Hornbaker favored C# .NET, which is in line with his comfort zone, while Meebo primarily has C and C++ in its code.

When asked about his Microsoft favoritism, Hornbaker told Pingdom he's familiar with the .NET platform.

“I’m most comfortable coding with C#.NET, and this was a personal project,” he said.
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