Six hosting companies share the top spot this month, with INetU, Hostway, IPower, New York Internet, Pair Networks and Tiscali all sharing the top spot as the most reliable hosting company site this month.

The six-way tie is a first for the reliability survey, as three and even four providers have shared the top position in the past. The showing reflects a strong month for hosting reliability, as the winners each had just 0.01 percent of their DNS responses fail, just a hair short of a perfect showing. All six companies have finished atop the survey at least once previously.

It was a particularly good month for providers hosting their home page on FreeBSD, four of whom (INetU, iPowerWeb, NY Internet and Pair Networks) shared the top spot with two hosts on Linux (Hostway and Tiscali). Overall, five Linux sites are found in the top 10 this month, four on FreeBSD and one on Windows.

The Internet experienced its strongest site growth ever last month, powered by a surge in blogs and free web sites. In the June 2006 survey we received responses from 85,541,228 sites, a gain of 3.96 million sites from the May report. This is the largest one-month increase in sites in the history of the Netcraft survey, surpassing a gain of 3.3 million in March 2003, although the 2003 gain was larger in percentage terms (8.5%, compared to 4.7% this month).

Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to 61.25%.

Apache's lead over Microsoft, which stood at 48.2% in March, has been narrowed to 31.5%, a shift of 16.7% in just three months.

The largest movement of sites from Apache to IIS was once again at Go Daddy, with over 1.6M hostnames moving from Apache to IIS this month. While those parked domains were a major factor in Microsoft's gains, Windows also saw solid growth in active sites, hostnames that contain content and likely to represent developed web sites.

Blogging services enjoyed strong growth, paced by Google's Blogger, which added more than 660K hostnames. The global nature of the blogging phenomenon was seen in large increases in blogs hosted at Germany's Intergenia AG and Japan's Excite.co.jp, both of which run on Windows web servers. Windows servers also got a boost from Microsoft's Office Live service, as it began to open its beta offering to more users.

Apache's loss of hostnames is due to decreases for Linux at a number of hosting companies. In addition to Go Daddy, six hosts reduced their use of Linux by 40K or more, including leading UK provider PIPEX Communications, Lycos and Zipa.