Web Server Survey Turns 10, Finds 70 Million Sites

The Web Server Survey marks its 10th anniversary this month with a milestone, as we now find more than 70 million web sites on the Internet. The August 2005 survey received responses from 70,392,567 sites, an increase of 2.8 million hostnames. This gain, together with the last month's increase of 2.7 million sites, marks the biggest two-month increase in the history of our survey. It comes just five months after the survey crossed the 60 million mark in March of this year, another sign that Internet growth is eclipsing even the torrid pace of the dot-com boom.

The first Netcraft survey in August 1995 found 18,957 hosts, with the NCSA web server dominating with 57 percent market share, leading CERN (19%) and a newcomer named Apache (3.5%). Microsoft's Internet Information Server launched in February 1996, and by the survey's fifth birthday the server market was largely divided up between Apache (62%) and IIS (19%).

That trend has continued, with Apache extending its share to nearly 70 percent this month as the survey has returned to its trend of incremental changes in share for Apache and Microsoft. Both are seeing steady growth, as Apache has added 11.9 million sites since last August, while Microsoft servers have added 10.7 million.

Sun is the sum of sites running SunONE, iPlanet-Enterprise, Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce & Netsite-Communications.

Microsoft is the sum of sites running Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS.

Platform groupings are here.