Both Apache and Microsoft have significant events scheduled during the next few weeks. Apachecon takes place November 16-19th in Las Vegas, and features tutorials and presentations by many of the Apache core team. Meanwhile, Microsoft has arranged a series of technical seminars at locations throughout Europe during October aimed at ISPs, hosting companies, and people running large scale Microsoft-IIS deployments.

Windows 2003 continues to increase in total hostname and active sites, with the number of active sites growing 109% to 185K since July 2003.

Largest Microsoft Windows Server 2003 hosting companies by Active sites, Sept 2003 Company Active Sites   Myhosting.com 32,810   Fasthosts 22,949   AdvancedAccess 10,439   Interland 8,066   1&1 Internet 6,027   InterNed Services 5,229   GMO 5,113   ViaWest 4,099

Myhosting.com continues to be the top hoster of active Windows Server 2003 sites, and now has over 98% of their active sites migrated to Windows 2003.

Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in January 2003 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 49% (153K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (16.5K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from FreeBSD (3K) and 1% from Solaris (2.5K).

Notably, the number of sites switching from Linux has proportionately kept pace since July when many commentators thought the 5% of sites switched to Windows 2003 from Linux was an aberration.

Rackshack recently started selling SSL Certificates at $25 per annum. Offering to bundle a certificate with a hosting service would be a completely conventional offer to a SSL site owner, but Rackshack is pushing the model further, by offering subsidised certificates purely as a way of bringing itself to SSL site owners' attention.

Featureprice customers suffered a prolonged unavailability of their sites during the summer.

Over the past 6 months many customers have moved to find alternative hosting services with over 69% of hostnames from May 2003 now elsewhere.

Sites Hosted At Featureprice

In the September 2003 survey we received responses from 43,144,374 sites.

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains
August 1995 - September 2003

Top Developers

Developer	August 2003	Percent	September 2003	Percent	Change
Apache	27388860	63.98	27836622	64.52	0.54
Microsoft	10165745	23.75	10156289	23.54	-0.21
SunONE	1534586	3.58	1501241	3.48	-0.10
Zeus	746240	1.74	742950	1.72	-0.02

Many events that could adversely affect performance and reliability hit the hosting industry during August including Distributed Denial of Service Attacks, the Power Outage in the North East US and Canada, a much shorter outage in London, the Blaster Worm, the SoBig Virus, and a deluge of related mail from poorly written anti-virus programs.

Remarkably the numbers of failed requests to hosting company sites did not rise significantly during the month; a testament to the durability of the Internet. However this hid some big variations: