One thing the most visited websites have in common is that they are dynamic websites. Their development typically involves server-side coding, client-side coding and database technology. The programming languages applied to deliver such dynamic web content vary vastly between sites.
| Websites | Popularity (unique visitors per month) [1] | Front-end (Client-side) | Back-end (Server-side) | Database | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google [2] | 2,800,000,000 | JavaScript, TypeScript | C, C++, Go, [3] Java, Python, Node | Bigtable, [4] MariaDB [5] | The most used search engine in the world. |
| 1,120,000,000 | JavaScript, TypeScript, Flow | Hack/HHVM, Python, C++, Java, Erlang, D, [6] Haskell [7] | MariaDB, MySQL, [8] HBase, Cassandra [9] | The most visited social networking site. | |
| YouTube | 1,100,000,000 | JavaScript, TypeScript | Python, C, C++, Java, [10] Go [11] | Vitess, BigTable, MariaDB [5] | The most popular video sharing site. |
| Yahoo | 750,000,000 | JavaScript | PHP | PostgreSQL, HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB, [12] | |
| Etsy | 516,000,000 (Total, not unique) [13] | JavaScript | PHP [14] | MySQL, Redis [15] | E-commerce website. |
| Amazon | 2,400,000,000 [16] | JavaScript | Java, C++, Perl [17] | DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora, Redshift [18] | The most used e-commerce site in the world. |
| Wikipedia | 475,000,000 | JavaScript | PHP | MariaDB [19] | A free online encyclopedia based on MediaWiki, which is programmed in PHP. |
| Fandom | 315,000,000 [20] | JavaScript | PHP | MySQL | Wiki hosting service. |
| X | 290,000,000 | JavaScript | C++, Java, [21] Scala, [22] Ruby (Ruby on Rails) | MySQL [23] | Popular social network. |
| Bing | 285,000,000 | JavaScript | C++, C# | Microsoft SQL Server, Cosmos DB | Search engine from Microsoft. |
| eBay | 285,000,000 | JavaScript | Java, [24] JavaScript, [25] Scala [26] | Oracle Database | Online auction house. |
| MSN | 280,000,000 | JavaScript | C# (ASP.NET) | Microsoft SQL Server | An email client, for simple use. Previously known as "messenger", not to be confused with Facebook's messaging platform. |
| 260,000,000 | JavaScript | Java, JavaScript, [27] Scala | Venice [28] [29] | World's largest professional network. | |
| 250,000,000 | JavaScript | Python (Django), [30] Erlang, Elixir [31] | MySQL, Redis [32] | Search engine for ideas. | |
| WordPress.com | 240,000,000 [33] | JavaScript | PHP [34] | MariaDB [35] | Website manager software. |
| Netflix | 223.090.000 (Subscribers, not visitors) | JavaScript | Python, Java [36] | NMDB, [37] PostgreSQL | The biggest video streaming service in the world. |
*data on programming languages is based on:
| Websites | C# | C | C++ | D | Elixir | Erlang | Go | Hack | Haskell | Java | JavaScript | Perl | PHP | Python | Ruby | Scala |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | |
| No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | |
| YouTube | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Yahoo | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Etsy | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Amazon | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Wikipedia | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Fandom | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| X | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Bing | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| eBay | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| MSN | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | |
| No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | |
| WordPress.com | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Netflix | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages.
MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database organizes data into one or more data tables in which data may be related to each other; these relations help structure the data. SQL is a language that programmers use to create, modify and extract data from the relational database, as well as control user access to the database. In addition to relational databases and SQL, an RDBMS like MySQL works with an operating system to implement a relational database in a computer's storage system, manages users, allows for network access and facilitates testing database integrity and creation of backups.
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. In 2023, the company’s seat in Forbes Global 2000 was 80. The company sells database software and cloud computing. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, Customer Experience Commerce and supply chain management (SCM) software.
PostgreSQL also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transactions with atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) properties, automatically updatable views, materialized views, triggers, foreign keys, and stored procedures. It is supported on all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and handles a range of workloads from single machines to data warehouses, data lakes, or web services with many concurrent users.
Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read. Memcached is free and open-source software, licensed under the Revised BSD license. Memcached runs on Unix-like operating systems and on Microsoft Windows. It depends on the libevent library.
Cascading is a software abstraction layer for Apache Hadoop and Apache Flink. Cascading is used to create and execute complex data processing workflows on a Hadoop cluster using any JVM-based language, hiding the underlying complexity of MapReduce jobs. It is open source and available under the Apache License. Commercial support is available from Driven, Inc.
In computing, a solution stack or software stack is a set of software subsystems or components needed to create a complete platform such that no additional software is needed to support applications. Applications are said to "run on" or "run on top of" the resulting platform.
Django is a free and open-source, Python-based web framework that runs on a web server. It follows the model–template–views (MTV) architectural pattern. It is maintained by the Django Software Foundation (DSF), an independent organization established in the US as a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
HBase is an open-source non-relational distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable and written in Java. It is developed as part of Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS or Alluxio, providing Bigtable-like capabilities for Hadoop. That is, it provides a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of sparse data.
Google App Engine is a cloud computing platform used as a service for developing and hosting web applications. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple Google-managed servers. GAE supports automatic scaling for web applications, allocating more resources to the web application as the amount of requests increases. It was released as a preview in April 2008 and launched officially in September 2011.
Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source database management system designed to handle large volumes of data across multiple commodity servers. Cassandra supports clusters and spanning of multiple data centers, featuring asynchronous and masterless replication. It enables low-latency operations for all clients and incorporates Amazon's Dynamo distributed storage and replication techniques, combined with Google's Bigtable data storage engine model.
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. As one of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now also supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. For this reason, Heroku is said to be a polyglot platform as it has features for a developer to build, run and scale applications in a similar manner across most of these languages. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $212 million.
Redis is a source-available, in-memory storage, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Because it holds all data in memory and because of its design, Redis offers low-latency reads and writes, making it particularly suitable for use cases that require a cache. Redis is the most popular NoSQL database, and one of the most popular databases overall. Redis is used in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Tinder, Yahoo, Adobe, Hulu, Amazon and OpenAI.
Opa is a programming language for developing scalable web applications. It is free and open-source software released under a GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3), and an MIT License.
GraalVM is a Java Development Kit (JDK) written in Java. The open-source distribution of GraalVM is based on OpenJDK, and the enterprise distribution is based on Oracle JDK. As well as just-in-time (JIT) compilation, GraalVM can compile a Java application ahead of time. This allows for faster initialization, greater runtime performance, and decreased resource consumption, but the resulting executable can only run on the platform it was compiled for.
Druid is a column-oriented, open-source, distributed data store written in Java. Druid is designed to quickly ingest massive quantities of event data, and provide low-latency queries on top of the data. The name Druid comes from the shapeshifting Druid class in many role-playing games, to reflect that the architecture of the system can shift to solve different types of data problems.
RocksDB is a high performance embedded database for key-value data. It is a fork of Google's LevelDB optimized to exploit multi-core processors (CPUs), and make efficient use of fast storage, such as solid-state drives (SSD), for input/output (I/O) bound workloads. It is based on a log-structured merge-tree data structure. It is written in C++ and provides official language bindings for C++, C, and Java. Many third-party language bindings exist. RocksDB is free and open-source software, released originally under a BSD 3-clause license. However, in July 2017 the project was migrated to a dual license of both Apache 2.0 and GPLv2 license. This change helped its adoption in Apache Software Foundation's projects after blacklist of the previous BSD+Patents license clause.
Microsoft, a tech company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
