Companies Using FreeBSD

FreeBSD is used by several big sites on the Internet, including
  • Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com): Yahoo uses FreeBSD and Apache on the server side. Large scale service providers like Yahoo wich have nearly 267,000 websites running on a big collection of FreeBSD machines are a major factor that drive FreeBSD
  • MP3.com: The MP3.com Web site uses FreeBSD and Apache to serve pages and mp3 music files.
  • A subsidiary of Baden-Württemberg , one of the largest banks in Germany, with a yearly turnover of around 3 billion Euros, uses FreeBSD. The firewall is PF run on FreeBSD, HTTP, DNS and FTP are all run on FreeBSD systems
  • Genua, which provides products to the German Federal Office for Information Security, the German parliament, other federal and state authorities and the German revenue board (ELSTER), bases its firewall product Genugate on OpenBSD code
  • Pair Networks: Pair Networks exclusively operates an Open Source Web hosting environment running on FreeBSD servers configured with Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL
  • Netcraft.com: Well-known web server survey firm Netcraft.com also uses BSD. According to an official from Netcraft, “Initially, we opted for FreeBSD because it was similar to SunOS, which we knew and liked. We felt safer with FreeBSD because we were quite conscious of the security implications of the Internet. We wanted to run an operating system for which source was available in the expectation that fixes for security vulnerabilities or other serious bugs would become available more quickly, and if needed we would have the opportunity to write it ourselves. FreeBSD wasn't a big investment in money or time, and so we thought if we wanted to replace it when something better came along it wouldn't have cost us much. So far…we've not felt the urge to replace it”
  • Microsoft (www.microsoft.com): Microsoft uses FreeBSD to power its Hotmail electronic-mail servers
  • Apache (www.apache.org)
  • Be, Inc. (www.be.com)
  • Blue Mountain Arts (www.bluemountain.com)
  • Pair Networks (www.pair.com)
  • Whistle Communications (www.whistle.com)
  • Sony Japan (www.sony.co.jp)

Netcraft also conducted a survey in 2004 of its Web host domains. The results of the survey showed that FreeBSD backed nearly 5 million active Web sites and nearly 2.5 million hosts were running an open source variant of the BSD Unix platform, a sharp increase from January 2002, when there were only about 1.5 million hosts running FreeBSD.