December 2005 Web Server Survey

In the December 2005 survey we received responses from 74,353,258 sites. That's a decrease of 219.5K sites from the November survey, marking the first decline in the Netcraft survey since January 2003. Thus, a record year for Internet growth has ended with a whimper rather than a bang. After gaining 17.5 million sites in the first 10 months of 2005, the Internet lost 30,000 sites over the next two months.

This month's results are influenced by a decline of 1 million hostnames at Zipa, a New Orleans provider of hosting and colocation. Zipa added 1 million new hostnames in our September survey, and had an identical number of domains expire this month, the majority of these being .name domains. The pattern suggests the expiring domains may have been .name domains registered through a promotion which allowed registrars to bulk-register .name domains for free for 60 days. Last month's results were also weighed down by a block of expiring domains, in that case more than 800K .info names registered by eNom.

The December survey sees momentum continue to shift in the web server market, where Microsoft gained 463K sites, of which around 300K were at German hosting company Intergenia, while Apache (which is used by Zipa) had a net decline of 903K. Windows servers also outpaced Apache in active sites for the third straight month, during which it has lifted its market share in active sites by 4.1 percent to 24.4 percent.

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.