After August, which contained the Blaster Worm, the SoBig Virus, and the North East US/Canada power outage, September was a much more benign month for the internet, with the top two sites showing remarkable reliability.

Just one of the 2976 requests made from our five performance measurement points to the British Telecom site failed, and only two out of 2976 requests failed to the Dell Host site.

These are the most reliable statistics that have been posted to date on a calendar month basis, and also the first time that a site running Windows has been placed top.

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In the October 2003 survey we received responses from 43,700,759 sites.

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

Top Developers

Developer	September 2003	Percent	October 2003	Percent	Change
Apache	27836622	64.52	28235972	64.61	0.09
Microsoft	10156289	23.54	10252227	23.46	-0.08
SunONE	1501241	3.48	1528090	3.50	0.02
Zeus	742950	1.72	735179	1.68	-0.04

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Since Verisign wildcarded the .com and .net Top Level Domains [TLDs], some people have become concerned that this might pollute the results of the Web Server Survey, eventually reaching the situation when 99.9% of the hostnames found are running Linux and Apache - Verisign's platform of choice for the site to which they redirect otherwise unresolved requests.

However, Verisign was not the first TLD operator to think of wildcarding their domains, and we already maintain a mechanism for preventing hostnames that resolve to the ip addresses of these wildcarding systems from being included in the survey. (more...)

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.