Download websites that use Cherokee

About Cherokee

Most web servers you find in a crawl are evidence of what someone runs. Cherokee is closer to evidence of what someone has not touched. Work on the project stopped long ago and the released code has not moved since, so a machine still answering with this server has outlived at least one round of the usual replacement cycle.

The version data makes the point better than any description can. We record 6 distinct versions across the sites we can identify, clustered around 1.2.104. A spread that narrow, on a project that no longer ships releases, is not fragmentation in the ordinary sense. Nothing new is arriving, so the distribution is a snapshot of when each machine was last built, frozen in place.

For that reason the entry works better as an indicator of infrastructure age than as a competitive one. Nobody is choosing this server today. Finding it means finding a host that was configured back when the project was current, kept running because it works, and never revisited since. Sites in that state tend to share other properties, including old runtimes underneath, unpatched libraries alongside and an owner who is not watching. Security researchers, hosting providers hunting migration candidates and anyone measuring the long tail of unmaintained infrastructure are all asking the same question, which is where the old machines are.

The technical background supports that reading. Cherokee was written in C and released under the GPL v2 license, with its first version dating to 2001, in the era when a small fast alternative to the incumbent servers was a live category. The project also shipped a browser based configuration panel, which put it in the hands of people who wanted a server they did not have to hand edit. Deployments of that kind are among the least likely to be audited afterwards, because the person who set one up may never have opened a config file at all.

Open licensing complicates the picture in a way worth flagging. Because the code was published under GPL v2, it can be packaged, forked and bundled by other people, so some of what we detect may come from a hosting panel or an appliance image that shipped the server rather than from an administrator who picked it deliberately. Bundled installations behave differently from chosen ones, since nobody involved may know the component is there, which makes them the harder half of the population to reach and the more interesting half to study.

One caveat matters more here than it does elsewhere. Server identification depends on what the server chooses to announce about itself, and any proxy, load balancer or content delivery network in front of it can rewrite or strip that announcement. Our count is a floor, not an estimate. As of October 2026 we detect Cherokee on 29 sites, and the real number of machines still running it is higher by an amount nobody can measure from the outside. Our records carry no country or domain suffix breakdown for this entry either, so geography has to be read off the domains themselves.