The Netcraft Secure Server Survey examines the use of encrypted transactions on the Web through extensive automated exploration of the Internet. Each month it provides timely answers to questions such as:

• How many companies are doing encrypted transactions over the Internet?
• Where are they?
• Whose server software do they use?
• Which authority do they obtain their certificates from?
• How many are using Extended Validation?
• Who hosts their server?
• What is the growth rate of SSL sites on the internet?

Tiscali Italia, Rackspace and Seeweb are the most reliable hosting company sites for September 2007, followed closely by Pair Networks, Go Daddy and Affinity.

Tiscali is a European telecommunications company based in Italy and markets its offerings predominantly in Italy, the UK, Germany, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. Tiscali's core business is providing internet access and has 2 million ADSL users in the UK and Italy. Tiscali has appeared within the top ten most reliable hosting companies four times this year. Conversely, Rackspace specialises in managed hosting and is well known for its promise of Fanatical Support. This is Rackspace's third appearance within the top ten this year, notably making first place for two consecutive months in April and May. Seeweb is an Italian company, which offers both shared and dedicated hosting and last appeared within the top ten in April.

Datapipe is the only hosting company to have made it into the top ten every month so far this year. Datapipe was the most reliable hosting company in March and also took second place in June and July.

In the October 2007 survey we received responses from 142,805,398 sites, an increase of 7.6 million sites since last month. This continues the strong gains seen last month, a rate of over 5% monthly growth, with MySpace, Microsoft Live.com, and Google's Blogger each gained over 1 million sites this month. Benefitting from the gains at MySpace and Microsoft Live, Microsoft-IIS now hosts over 50 million sites.

Apache loses 2.8% share this month, partly through the strong growth at the major blogging systems, and partly due to 2.5 million domains on Apache expiring at trouble-free.net. Apache has around a 10% market share advantage over IIS now, which is the smallest gap between the two since IIS was launched in 1996.

On the active sites measure which excludes templated sites, Apache gains 1 million sites this month, though this is eclipsed by growth of nearer 3 million for Microsoft-IIS.

The BBC News website has been suffering outages today while its hosting location fluctuated between BBC Internet Services and the Akamai web application acceleration and performance management service.

For many users this afternoon, the front page of the BBC News site has been slow to respond, often displaying error messages such as "No suitable nodes are available to serve your request" and "an error occurred while processing this directive". Other users found that requests to news.bbc.co.uk caused the server to continually redirect their request back to news.bbc.co.uk, causing an infinite redirection loop which would have added to the load on the servers.

Today's performance problems coincide with apparent moves to and from the Akamai content distribution network. Prior to today, the news.bbc.co.uk site had been self-hosted by BBC Internet Services in Docklands, London.

For some periods today, the BBC News website had resolved to IP addresses belonging to Akamai, while other times it had either been pointed back to BBC Internet Services at Docklands, or did not resolve at all, thus leaving the site completely inaccessible.

Akamai transparently mirrors content stored on web servers and users then access the content from these instead of the origin server. By automatically picking a mirror server that is near to the user, performance is generally increased while decreasing the load on the origin server.

Update: Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website, has published a blog article about the site problems.