Companies Using AlmaLinux

AlmaLinux is the clearest migration story in our data and the least ambiguous one I have looked at this year. Our August 2026 crawl detects it on 13,392 domains, 7,948 of which resolve to a company record, a 59.3% match rate. After fifteen years building crawling and detection infrastructure, my view is that header signals like this one are the most reliable thing we collect and the easiest to over-read. So this starts with what the number is.

What 13,392 counts

AlmaLinux reaches us in one line of an HTTP response. A server running it answers with something like Apache/2.4.62 (AlmaLinux) OpenSSL/3.2.2 in its Server header, and that string is the entire detection. I wrote up how the wider pipeline works in our guide to technology detection methods. This one is as simple as detection gets.

So 13,392 is a floor, not an estimate of installations. A CDN answers with its own header and the origin distribution disappears, administrators suppress the token on purpose because ServerTokens Prod is standard hardening advice, and a machine that does not serve HTTP is invisible to us entirely.

Sales Signal: The bias is itself information. A domain that discloses its distribution is a server someone configured by hand, not a managed platform behind an edge network, which makes it a better qualified list than the full install base would be.

"Every domain in this count either chose to expose its own server or never turned the disclosure off. That one fact tells you more about how the estate is run than the distribution name does." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

The CentOS corridor is the whole story

Most migration sections on this site end in an apology: we find domains that dropped one product while running a competitor, then learn that most of them still run both, and the section comes down. AlmaLinux is the opposite case. 283 domains dropped CentOS while running AlmaLinux against 6 going the other way, a margin of roughly 47 to 1, and 96 of those arrivals landed in the last 30 days with 279 inside 90.

The mechanism is not in dispute, which is what makes the number readable. CloudLinux built AlmaLinux in 2021 to replace CentOS Linux after Red Hat ended it, and the project ships an in-place converter: a CentOS server changes distribution while keeping its domain, its Apache install and its content. CentOS Linux 7 reached end of maintenance on 30 June 2024, and the tail of that decision is still moving through our records two years later. Ubuntu takes CentOS domains too, but that move needs a rebuild rather than a conversion.

One caveat I would put on any header-based corridor: a token can change because someone rebuilt a server or because someone edited a configuration file. At 47 to 1 that cannot account for the direction, though it does mean the exact magnitude is approximate.

Free rebuild in, paid subscription out

The smaller flow runs upward. 42 domains left AlmaLinux for Red Hat, the commercial distribution AlmaLinux is built to stay compatible with. That is about a seventh the size of the CentOS inflow, and it has an odd shape: all 42 fall between 30 and 90 days ago, with none in the last 30. On a base that small a quiet month is not a trend, and I would look again at the next rollup before calling it one. The direction is plain enough: the free rebuild takes domains from the free distribution it replaced and gives a few back to the paid product above it.

Sales Signal: Both directions are addressable and they are different pitches. The 283 arrivals are estates in the middle of a migration, so the window for tooling, hardening and support work is open now. The 42 that went to Red Hat are the accounts that decided free was not enough, which is the closest thing this category has to a qualified upsell list.

"A 47 to 1 corridor is rare. In most categories two products sit side by side for years and nothing actually switches. Here the old distribution stops answering and the new one answers in its place, on the same domain, in one step." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

A head of universities on a tail of small hosting

Two populations share this profile and they have little in common. By volume it is small: 67.53% of the 7,028 companies we can size employ 10 people or fewer and 86.95% employ 50 or fewer, while only 10 companies in the whole matched base sit in the 10,001+ band. Then look at the head. Ordered by LinkedIn following, 21 of the 34 largest organisations we can name are in higher education or research: the University of Kentucky, the University of Miami, Louisiana State University, the University of Hong Kong, Caltech and Punjab University among them.

The age data agrees. 32.52% of matched companies were founded before 1990, so the 2020s band (11.27%) is smaller than the 1990s (13.23%). AlmaLinux is five years old and a third of the base we can date predates the web.

Worth stating plainly, because the named list invites the wrong conclusion: Higher Education does not appear among the twelve largest industries in our data at all, which puts it under 1.8% of classified companies. Universities dominate the head because they have enormous LinkedIn followings, not because they are the bulk of the base. Both readings are true, and only one of them is a market.

Sales Signal: Sell to the head and the tail separately. The institutional cohort buys through procurement, runs its own hardware, and is reachable through whoever owns the subdomain, since 25 of our 34 named detections sit on one rather than the main site. The tail is a hosting channel, not a set of accounts.

The Netherlands is a channel, not a market

The United States leads on 1,757 matched domains (22.1%) and the Netherlands sits 12 behind on 1,745 (22.0%). That near-tie is the most misreadable number on this page. It is not Dutch companies picking a distribution, it is Dutch shared hosting standardising on one: cPanel ended CentOS support and lists AlmaLinux among its supported systems, and a hosting estate that converts brings every site on it along.

The evidence is in who is absent. Not one of the 34 largest organisations we name is Dutch, while Brazil, on 402 matched domains against the Netherlands' 1,745, supplies three of them. A country with a fifth of the base and none of the head is a channel. The industry split says the same thing: nothing breaks 5%, IT Services leads at 4.54% and the twelve industries we hold cover only 34.88% of classified companies.

Sales Signal: Two different targets. Sell infrastructure services to the Dutch hosting providers themselves, where one conversation covers thousands of domains, and sell to named accounts everywhere else.

One header, three detections

Apache appears on 99.87% of AlmaLinux domains and OpenSSL on 63.75%. Neither is a finding: both are printed in the same string the distribution is, so one header produces three of our detections. It also means AlmaLinux servers fronted by other software sit outside this count by construction.

The rest of the stack is ordinary web. jQuery is on 72.51%, WordPress on 44.30%, RSS on 40.95% and Google Analytics on 39.69%. That is a brochure-site stack on shared hosting, and it corroborates the size distribution rather than adding to it.

Sales Signal: The WordPress overlap is the practical cross-sell. Nearly half of these servers run a CMS that needs patching on a different cadence than the operating system under it, and the person responsible for both is usually the same person.

Key takeaways

• 13,392 is a disclosure count, not an install count. CDNs, suppressed tokens and non-HTTP machines sit outside it.
• The CentOS corridor is the profile. 283 in against 6 out, with 96 arrivals in the last 30 days.
• Fifth of sixteen, closing on what it replaced. 1.64% share, 41.8% of the CentOS footprint that remains.
• Small by volume, institutional at the head. 67.53% employ 10 or fewer, yet 21 of the 34 largest named organisations are universities or research institutes.
• The Netherlands is hosting, not adoption. 1,745 matched domains, no Dutch organisation in the named list.

Sales applications

Outreach template: "Hi [Name], several hosts on [Company]'s estate answer with AlmaLinux in their response headers. Since March we have recorded 283 domains moving off CentOS onto AlmaLinux against 6 going the other way. Where has that left your patching and compliance evidence?"

Targeting strategy: Filter for a live CentOS detection alongside an AlmaLinux one on the same account. Those are estates mid-conversion, buying migration tooling, hardening and support in the same quarter.

Competitive angle: AlmaLinux costs nothing, so the sale is never displacement. It is whatever free does not cover: security maintenance evidence, compliance attestation, someone to call at 3am. The 42 domains that moved on to Red Hat are proof that part of this base will pay for it.

Explore the full AlmaLinux base at TechnologyChecker.io: 13,392 detected domains, 7,948 of them matched to a company record with industry, size, location and stack data.