March 2006 Web Server Survey

In the March 2006 survey we received responses from 77,568,868 sites, an increase of 1.38 million from February 2006. This month's hostname growth has a somewhat speculative flavor, as the survey found nearly 2.8 million new hostnames this month, but just 237K new active sites. That ratio of one active site for every 12 hostnames is much lower than in recent months (in September 2005 the ratio was one in five).

That means a larger percentage of new domains are being parked, rather than used on active web sites. The trend is likely connected to media coverage of domain investing, which appears to have prompted a surge in speculative buying. That means more domains are being bought for resale or ad revenue, rather than for use with web sites.

Infrastructure changes at huge hosting providers once again influence web server market share. Apache gains 1.5 million hostnames this month, including more than 950K at Go Daddy which had been reclassified in January to "Unknown" due to changes in the front-end system used in Go Daddy's bulk hosting service. That shift helps Apache regain 0.7 percent market share, with other servers showing little change this month.

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.