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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

What would you recommend as a better source?

A more reliable source would be a well-conducted survey. Or, honestly, having worked for one of the big shared hosting providers, by the numbers small sites outnumber big sites to a staggering degree. One could get a pretty representative sample of overall share by asking the huge providers what appears to run the sites hosted on their services by percentage.

I have no particular reason to doubt more than half of sites are run by PHP considering the portion of sites that are WordPress. However, I also have no particular reason to trust that 77% is an accurate proportion.

There's no good source on back end tech market share. The simple truth is that there's no way to know what a server is running unless the server lets you know.

I'd say instead that there's no guaranteed way. There are likely markers though. For example if you navigate the website and get a cookie set with name "..._laravel", you can safely assume it's a PHP app for stats purposes. There are also more subtle things like the format of csrf, format of error responses, behaviour for weird data passed in (especially name[]=value), etc.

Indeed, but that's not really a good source to estimate market share as there will be a strong bias towards stacks that are more conspicuous.

PHPSESSID :)

only if the site started a session

There isn't one. PHP stopped sending X-Powered-By by default years ago.

There simply isn't any source. Headers can be removed or they can be modified to say a site is using X when it really uses Y. Any other detections have just as many problems, having files ending in php doesn't mean they are php, even a site that has something like phpversion.php could be just a saved HTML copy.

The biggest PHP users on the linked list don't even expose that they use PHP, but it is publicly known (though Facebook uses [or used] their own fork of PHP called HHVM).

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