In the February 2012 survey we received responses from 612,843,429 sites. Compared to January, this represents an increase of 30M hostnames or +5.2%.

nginx was the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month, gaining 0.27 percentage points. Apache did experience a growth of 19M hostnames, but its market share has remained static, while Microsoft and Google had a small drop in market share despite gaining 3.9M and 450K hostnames respectively.

Within the Million Busiest Sites nginx continued its steady growth; gaining just over 12K new sites. Apache saw the biggest loss this month with a drop of 18K hostnames.

The Resin application server has been experiencing strong growth over the past 12 months; seeing an almost tenfold growth from 480k hostnames in February 2011 to 4.7M or 0.77% of the market in February 2012. Resin is a Java application server from Caucho which is used on a number of the Million Busiest Sites, including Bebo — now recovered from its outage last week.

Netcraft has been tracking Citrix NetScaler in the Web Server Survey for more than a year. In the latest survey, more than ten million sites were found using Citrix NetScaler.

Citrix bought NetScaler Inc. in 2005 for approximately $300M in cash and stock, acquiring an already maturing network appliance platform. NetScaler provides load balancing, an application firewall, and application acceleration to improve the performance and security of large web applications. NetScaler can run on a variety of dedicated hardware platforms, or it can be run as a server-based virtual appliance. BIG-IP is a competing product from F5 with similar features which reached 10 million sites back in May 2009.

1.71% of all websites found this month were served using the Citrix NetScaler platform; but within the top 100k busiest websites NetScaler's share is much higher at 9.24%. The country distribution of the installed base has a few peculiarities: almost 30% of the websites hosted in Turkey and 20% of the websites hosted in Korea are using NetScaler. In Turkey, the blogcu.com network is using Citrix NetScaler and in Korea more than 50% of the co.cc subdomains were found to be using the platform. Worldwide, Microsoft, eBay, Weather.com, CNET, and MasterCard are among the busiest sites using Citrix NetScaler.

Social network Bebo is still inaccessible after an apparent technical error took the site offline yesterday.

Bebo was previously hosted on the Akamai content delivery network, which generally increases a site's resilience to network outages and traffic spikes, but DNS lookups for the www.bebo.com website are currently not resolving:

$ ping www.bebo.com
ping: cannot resolve www.bebo.com: Host name lookup failure

$ dig www.bebo.com
; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <<>> www.bebo.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Twitter is currently awash with self-propagating rumours that Bebo has been shut down for good; however, this has been debunked by TechCrunch, which reports a Bebo spokesperson as saying the site went down due to "a technical clusterf**k". Michael Birch, who originally founded Bebo with his wife Xochi, also tweeted that the site should be coming back in a matter of hours.

The United States Department of Justice appears to be under attack for the second time since the popular Megaupload file sharing site was taken down. The group Anonymous appears to be carrying out this latest attack in protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

In its Mega Song music video, which was released last month, Megaupload claimed the site had 1 billion users and accounted for 4% of all traffic on the internet. www.megaupload.com was the 77th busiest site according to the Netcraft Toolbar. The company's main website was hosted by Carpathia Hosting, but now displays an FBI anti-piracy warning hosted by Amazon. The warning explains, "This domain name associated with the website Megaupload.com has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court." Despite the static nature of the warning page, it appears to have struggled with the amount of traffic it was receiving over the weekend:

Plans by Anonymous to launch a distributed denial of service attack against www.governo.it were changed half an hour before the attack was scheduled to commence. The group used IRC, Twitter, Pastebin and image sharing sites to advertise the attack a day before it was due to start, but the surprise change meant that www.italia.gov.it unexpectedly ended up bearing the brunt of the attack.

The DDoS attack against www.italia.gov.it was immediately successful, with the site becoming inaccessible from 14:00 UTC on Thursday. The attack appeared to subside a few hours later and the site is now functioning normally with no apparent changes to its infrastructure.

After seeing how easily its "lulzcannon" were able to take down www.italia.gov.it, some members of Anonymous called for the original target, www.governo.it, to be attacked as well. It was not apparent how many people took part in this secondary attack, but it appeared to have a minimal impact on the site's availability: