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.
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.
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.
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.
And that is why to this day I always carry a stick of butter in my purse. Also, that is why I always enable WP SuperCache and nginx proxy_cache when running a WordPress site. Or just use a static site generator.
Sorry, probably a bit of stupid humor on my part. American Dad! season 6 episode 10. Francine and Stan have been married for a really long time and Francine always tell Stan the same story: she got her head stuck in the staircase banister and her mother got her out using a stick of butter, so now she also always carries a stick of butter in her purse in case of emergencies.
This is mildly like the situation where you should always slashdot-proof your web servers if it's easy to do, just in case some piece of content you have on there gets slashdotted. I feel like I say this so much that it's become my "stick of butter" story.
YUI stands for Yahoo User Interface. They wrote it and open-sourced it, like Google with the Closure Library. I wouldn't count it as a third-party library.
Right, it's not 3rd party, but it is included in the statistics that show 90% jQuery market share, and the argument was that the biggest websites are not represented there.
Not using foreign key constraints is a good idea. Occasionally. Very occasionally.