Download websites that use CentOS

About CentOS

Red Hat redirected the project towards a rolling release that runs ahead of the enterprise product instead of trailing it, and a free rebuild that a generation of hosting shops had standardised on stopped being the thing they had originally signed up for. The installed base has been draining towards successors ever since. What remains is a population of servers nobody has migrated yet, and a list of those servers is a list of unfinished work with a date attached.

As of September 2026 we attribute 1,052,435 sites to it, filed by our taxonomy under Operating systems. Attribution comes from what a server volunteers about itself, mainly banner strings in response headers and version suffixes that packaged software appends to its own identifiers. Operators who strip or falsify those strings drop out of the count entirely, and hardened estates strip them as a matter of policy, so the remaining base is larger than what we can show. The bias is not random either. Well run infrastructure hides the banner and neglected infrastructure advertises it, which tilts our view of this population towards precisely the servers a security researcher wants to find.

Presence on a host says something quite specific. Somebody chose a free rebuild of an enterprise distribution to avoid a licence fee, built production on it, and then either never received or never acted on the notice that the ground had moved. The site in front of such a server may be perfectly healthy. The maintenance posture behind it usually is not. The inference is why this list has value to three buyers who never speak to each other, namely vendors selling migration paths, security teams building exposure inventories, and hosting companies looking for accounts whose current provider has stopped investing.

Geography behaves comparatively well for a server technology, because the banner comes from the machine itself rather than from a shared third party script. United States accounts for 406,446 of the detections and the extension column concentrates on .com, a spread that matches where inexpensive hosting capacity sits rather than where any particular industry does. The distribution appeared in 2004 under the GPL v2 licence, and the free of charge, source compatible proposition that made it popular is exactly what makes its users hard to reach. Nobody bought anything, so nobody is in a customer database.

A lookup will tell you that one server reports this operating system. An inventory question cannot be answered that way at all. Which providers still carry large blocks of it. Which of those blocks sit behind sites that take payments, where an unpatched base is an actual liability rather than a theoretical one. Whether the count inside a given network is falling month over month or standing still, which is the difference between an estate being migrated and an estate being abandoned. Answering any of that means holding the population in one file, joining it to your own account list, and diffing it against an earlier snapshot. Our export carries the domain, the stack detected around the server, the country and extension fields, and the crawl date that makes the diff possible.