Companies Using Gentoo

Gentoo is an operating system we never see directly. It reaches us as a suffix in PHP's version string, in the X-Powered-By header PHP sends unless someone switches it off. Our October 2026 crawl finds 619 live domains with that suffix, 242 of them matched to a company, 10th of 16 in Operating Systems. A count this small is easy to inflate with dead sites or one operator's fleet, so before writing about it I checked whether the header is still live, who writes it and how many separate owners sit behind it.

The version strings

On 15 October 2026 I requested 50 random Gentoo domains again. 45 still sent the header; the other five returned an error, answered without it or didn't answer. 44 of the 45 carried a version, and 43 of those were PHP 5.x: 24 on 5.6, 9 on 5.3, 7 on 5.2, 2 on 5.4 and 1 on 5.5. One ran PHP 7.0 and one sent the bare word "gentoo". According to php.net, PHP 5.2 reached end of life in January 2011, 5.6 in December 2018 and 7.0 in January 2019. On 619 domains, a 90% live share suggests about 557 still send it.

Sales signal: almost every site here runs a PHP version that hasn't had a security release in years. Migration, hosting and website-security services have an exact, checkable reason to call.

A handful of hosts

I resolved all 625 domains in our clean set and grouped them by network. SpaceWeb, a Russian hosting company, carries 176 (28.2%). MindZplay, a practice-management and website platform for massage and chiropractic clinics, hosts 84 on one server. NetZone AG, a Swiss host, has 42; forty web-proxy sites share one OVHcloud address; the Czech host Web4ce has 29 and the Hungarian QwertyNet 17. Those six account for 388 of the 625 domains, 62.1%. In each case the PHP build came with the server.

Counting owners instead of domains shrinks the list again. The forty proxy sites look like one operator's fleet, and eleven adult-video sites share a single server in the United States. I still kept the page, because the remaining sites belong to hundreds of separate small owners, and a live share of 90% leaves well over 500 domains sending the header.

Sales signal: the buyer for anything at the server level is the host, and there are only a handful. For SpaceWeb's or MindZplay's customers, the message is about the site itself.

Flat, and stickier than it looks

The chart reads 428 in June, 591 in July, 603 in August, 610 in September and 619 in October. The step into July is our crawl covering more of the web and our detection widening, and the domain list turns over every month as dead sites leave and new ones arrive. Since tracking began in March 2026, 72 domains dropped the header, but 43 of them still send it from another hostname. Only 29 left entirely.

"Almost nobody chose Gentoo for these websites. A host built PHP on it years ago, and the sites kept running on whatever version they had." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: this base doesn't churn on its own. Change comes when a host retires an old server, so watch the hosts rather than the sites.

Clinics, consultancies and small firms

72.96% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees. Medical Practices is the top industry at 13.25%, and that's MindZplay's clinics again, which is also why Canada leads the country list with 68 matched companies. Switzerland (27), Germany (23), the United States (22) and Russia (20) follow; Russia is under-counted because few SpaceWeb sites match a company record. The recognisable names are institutions with one old site: Bialystok University of Technology on a newsletter page, Argentina's CAME, the Atlantic City Free Public Library and the Canadian Association of Genetic Counsellors.

Sales signal: for clinics, approach the platform first; one MindZplay change moves 84 domains. For associations and libraries, the owner of the old site is usually a communications or IT lead with a small budget.

No switching to speak of

We publish no switching rows for Gentoo. The only overlap of note is Ubuntu: 5 domains run both today on different hostnames, out of 9 that ever did. That fits the picture. A site on SpaceWeb doesn't migrate from Gentoo to Ubuntu; it moves to a new host, or the host moves it, and the PHP header changes with it.

"On a header signal, an operating-system switch is usually a hosting move. For Gentoo we see so few that the honest answer is: these sites are standing still." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: pitch the move itself. A site owner on PHP 5 needs a new host or a rebuilt site, and few will have a view on which distribution comes next.

The stack

PHP runs on 99.84% of the 625 domains because PHP is the signal. Apache serves 50.88% and Nginx 42.4%, with SpaceWeb answering through Nginx. WordPress is on only 7.2%, with Joomla at 4.64%, Drupal 3.2%, TYPO3 2.56% and 1C-Bitrix at 1.92%. On Fedora's domains, for comparison, WordPress runs on 33.98%. Many of these sites were built long ago on other systems. Cloudflare fronts 10.72%.

Sales signal: rebuild offers fit better than plugin offers here, because a site stuck on PHP 5 needs its runtime and its CMS replaced together.

Key takeaways

1. 619 live domains, 10th of 16 in Operating Systems, with 45 of 50 sampled sites still sending the header.

2. 43 of 44 versioned headers were PHP 5.x, years past end of life.

3. Five hosts and platforms and one proxy fleet carry 62.1% of the domains, led by SpaceWeb with 28.2%.

4. A micro-business base: 72.96% with 10 or fewer staff, with clinics on one platform at the top.

5. No switching rows; most drops are one hostname changing while the site stays.

How to use this list

Group the rows by host before you count prospects, because SpaceWeb and MindZplay account for a large part of the list. For the full list of 619 Gentoo domains with company, size and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io.