Companies Using Perl

I run the crawler that stores the response headers of every domain we visit, and Perl is the row where the header says the most about the server and the least about the site. A domain counts when its Server header names Perl, or when a page carries the Discus forum's search form. Our October 2026 crawl puts that at 3,447 domains after cleaning, 6th of 13 in Programming Languages, with 1,698 matched to a company. On 16 October 2026 I re-requested a random 15% of the domains, 554 of them, 535 of which survive the cleaning, and resolved every address to its network. Our guide to technology detection methods explains how header rules work.

What the banner means

95.94% of the clean domains run mod_perl, the Apache module that embeds a Perl interpreter, and Apache announces it with its version and Perl's. That is the whole signal for nearly every row: the server can run Perl. Whether the site does is a separate question. 1,971 of these domains also run PHP, and WordPress shows on 30.49%. The Discus clause adds nothing today; none of the sampled domains matched it.

Sales signal: read a Perl banner as an Apache build decision. The site owner may never have written a line of Perl.

Bundles and hosts write much of it

79 of the 535 cleaned sample domains (14.77%) have the shape of a bundled stack, a "(Unix)" Apache listing OpenSSL, PHP, mod_perl and Perl in one line. 20 of them carry Perl 5.34.1 with mod_perl 2.0.12, the pairing in XAMPP 8.2.12 for Linux, the last Linux build Apache Friends published; the rest have the same shape with older versions. Then come hosts. 59 of the 535 (11.03%) resolved to Brownrice Internet's network, and 58 of those sent the same "codeit" Apache build with mod_perl: law offices, ski shops and charities, mostly in New Mexico and Colorado. 20 more were German chimney sweeps' websites from one template, all on one IP address and answering with an Apache 2.2.9 banner from Debian 5. Across the clean set, 141 domains carry that template's title.

"More than a quarter of Perl's web footprint is someone else's Apache build: a bundle, a regional host, a template server for chimney sweeps." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: for clustered rows the decision-maker is the host or template provider. One conversation there reaches dozens of domains.

Platforms and real Perl applications

Real estate shows up because of one platform: 21 cleaned sample domains were brokerage sites, and all 9 that I opened referenced Terabitz, a real-estate website platform, including Century 21 Select Real Estate and Coldwell Banker Select. Actual Perl applications are a smaller, more valuable group: EPrints repositories at Liverpool John Moores and OCAD, Mojolicious on 2.81% of the clean set, including RectorSeal's partner portal, and Perl Dancer at ISTA's Research Explorer.

Sales signal: repository, research and portal teams running EPrints or Mojolicious are the buyers for Perl skills, support and hosting.

How much of it is current

487 of the 535 cleaned domains (91.03%) still sent a Perl banner on 16 October 2026. 24 didn't answer, 10 returned an error and 4 showed placeholder or default pages. Before any of this, we removed 104 French domains listed for sale, titled "est en vente" and mostly on OVH, which our title filter had missed. Since we began tracking on 16 March 2026, 369 domains dropped the banner on at least one hostname, and 59 of those still send it from another. We chart only October 2026, because earlier months predate the cleaning, and any month-to-month view mixes in our side: the set of domains we crawl turns over every month, dead sites out and newly found ones in, and our detection widens.

Sales signal: nine in ten rows are live servers you can contact.

Old versions in plain sight

Banners print versions, so age is visible. Of the 487 live banners, 148 (30.39%) announce Perl 5.16 and 54 come from Apache 2.2, a line the Apache project's httpd site declares end-of-life, with a final release, 2.2.34, in July 2017. Newer Perl 5.40 and 5.42 releases appear on current Debian and Fedora builds.

Sales signal: an Apache 2.2 banner is a public, dated maintenance problem. Hosting migrations and security reviews have an obvious opening.

Who and where

The United States holds 640 of the 1,698 matched companies (37.69%), Germany 168, India 71 and Canada 62. 58.79% of companies with a known size employ 1 to 10 people; 57 employ more than 1,000. IT services lead industries at 6.4%, real estate follows at 4.8% thanks to Terabitz, and higher education is 4.12%. The founding years cluster in the 2000s and 2010s.

Sales signal: treat universities separately. They run real Perl software and have the budgets; the rest of the list is a hosting market.

Overlap with other languages

We publish no switching rows for Perl. 1,971 domains run Perl and PHP today, and of the 2,197 that ran both at some point since March, 1,971 (89.7%) still do. 317 run Perl and Python, often one Apache banner listing mod_perl and mod_wsgi together.

"Perl and PHP on the same domain is almost always the same server. Nobody is migrating; the modules stay loaded." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: a banner with mod_perl, mod_wsgi and PHP is a server nobody has pruned. Consolidation is the pitch.

The stack around it

Across the 3,447 clean domains, Apache answers on 96.34%, OpenSSL shows on 91.85% and mod_ssl on 11.72%. WordPress runs on 30.49%, Elementor on 6.41% and Drupal on 2.44%. GoDaddy's 14.82% is mostly DNS: 81 of the 535 cleaned sample domains use its nameservers. The networks are mixed: Brownrice Internet 11.03% of the sample, Amazon 8.79%, Hetzner 8.41% and OVH 5.23%.

Sales signal: for nearly a third of the list, WordPress services fit better than anything Perl-specific.

Key takeaways

1. 3,447 domains name Perl in their Server header after cleaning; 91.03% of a random 535 still did on 16 October 2026.

2. 95.94% run mod_perl, and 1,971 also run PHP.

3. Bundles and hosts write much of the count: XAMPP-style stacks, Brownrice Internet, one chimney-sweep template.

4. The real Perl applications are EPrints repositories, Mojolicious and Dancer apps.

How to use this list

Split it by banner: universities and research institutes for Perl services, clustered hosts for partnership deals, and the rest for hosting and WordPress offers. Perl itself is free, open-source software under the Artistic License or GPL, per perl.org. The full list of 3,447 domains, with 1,698 matched companies, is on TechnologyChecker.io.