In the November 2009 survey we received responses from 233,636,281 sites.

The largest share growth comes from nginx, with a 1.1 million increase again this month bringing its total up to 15 million. Over the past three months the number of nginx's sites has increased by 3.5 million, matching Apache for growth, and far surpassing Microsoft's 200k increase.

This month, the open source version control system, Subversion has formally submitted itself to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator. Each project makes substantial use of the other. Subversion uses Apache to make repositories available over the WebDAV/DeltaV protocol while Apache uses Subversion for versioning of the source code.

For October SingleHop and Acens had the most reliable hosting company sites.

SingleHop, who in October went skydiving to celebrate a 19.5% revenue increase over the second quarter of 2009, came joint first by responding to all of Netcraft's requests. SingleHop's main site runs PHP and uses Apache on Linux.

Acens joined SingleHop at the top of the table in October. This is the second time Acens has been in the top spot this year, the other being in March. Acens is a Spanish hosting company that was set up in 1997. Like SingleHop, Acen's website is powered by PHP on an Apache sever and Linux operating system.

INetU narrowly missed out on first place this time, but has been in the top ten for nine out of ten months this year. INetU's homepage is powered by PHP and runs on Apache. In October's top ten most reliable hosting companies seven are running their website on Linux, one Windows Server 2008 and one FreeBSD.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies' own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.

Further information on the measurement process and current measurements are available.

Ubuntu.com was unavailable for some short periods during yesterday's release of Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala":

The 9.10 versions of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, and Ubuntu Studio were also released at the same time.

The Ubuntu.com website is itself powered by an Ubuntu server running Apache 2.2.8. Netcraft's October Web Server Survey found a total of 1.4 million websites being served from known Ubuntu machines, nearly all of which were running the open source Apache web server.

The White House launched a new version of its website on Saturday. While little has changed on the surface, the underlying technology is now powered by the open source Drupal content management system.

The www.whitehouse.gov site was previously served by Microsoft IIS 6.0, but the new server software identifies itself as "White House". The new site continues to use Akamai's content delivery network for caching.

Drupal is the 6th largest PHP-based content management system in Netcraft's Web Server Survey, being found on more than 400,000 websites. Drupal's security will no doubt be put to the test in the coming weeks, as the White House website has always stood as an obvious target for hackers. Drupal's security team has a full disclosure policy of announcing security problems after they have been fixed, rather than withholding the information from its users.

Drupal's core security advisories are made public at http://drupal.org/security. Eight advisories have been published so far this year, which have included two highly critical file inclusion flaws which could have allowed remote attackers to execute code on Windows servers.

Following its initial announcement on April 23, Yahoo! will today close down its GeoCities free hosting service and delete all GeoCities files from their servers. Existing members are being encouraged to move their sites to the commercial Yahoo! Web Hosting service, and GeoCities Plus customers will be able to upgrade to Yahoo! Web Hosting at no extra charge.

Not all traces of GeoCities will disappear after today — Yahoo! states that existing GeoCities email addresses will continue to work, and the Internet Archive has been working to archive as many sites as possible before GeoCities closes today.

Free hosting services have always been attractive to fraudsters, and the speculation over the profitably of GeoCities may not have been the only reason for today's closure — nearly all of the phishing attacks hosted on geocities.com this month were actually targeted against its owner, Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! stopped accepting new registrations on April 23, the number of phishing attacks hosted at geocities.com has seen a surge in October. Of the 930 confirmed phishing sites hosted at GeoCities in 2009, 143 of these were reported this month.

Today's closure will no doubt inconvenience some fraudsters, but other free hosting services are available, and indeed, plenty of these are already used to host phishing sites.