In the December 2007 survey we received responses from 155,230,051 sites. This is an increase of 5.4 million sites since last month, continuing the very strong growth seen during this year; the web has grown by nearly 50 million sites since December 2006.

This once again breaks the record for growth of the web in one year; the previous highest growth was 30 million sites in 2006. The growth is also impressive in percentage terms, with the web growing by 48% since last December — although this remains far less than the runaway growth of 160% seen back in 2000.

While there continues to be strong growth in the traditional hosting, the most dramatic growth this year has been the inclusion of ever larger numbers of sites at blogging service providers. The three largest alone — MySpace, Live Spaces and Blogger — now account for around 25 million sites in the survey. Both Microsoft and Google are attracting large numbers of users by integrating a range of services — search, online collaboration, blogging and electronic mail.

The growth in the number of active sites — an alternative measure that excludes parked domains and other templated sites — has also been impressive, with nearly 19 million new active sites since last December, for annual growth of 38%.

Hurricane Electric is the most reliable hosting company site for November 2007, closely followed by Seeweb, 3FN, Canada Web Hosting and Rackspace.

Hurricane Electric is November's most reliable hosting company and specializes in colocation, dedicated servers, direct internet connections and web hosting on its own network, which uses multiple OC192s, OC48s and gigabit ethernet.

Seeweb is an Italian company, which offers both shared and dedicated hosting and has moved up from third place last month. 3FN makes a third place appearance, also offering dedicated servers and shared hosting, while Canada Web Hosting takes forth place, offering managed hosting solutions on both Linux and Windows. Rackspace makes its fifth appearance within the top ten this year, with its best performance being seen in the consecutive months of April and May, where it took first place.

November is the first month this year where DataPipe has been absent from the top ten. Datapipe was the most reliable hosting company last month, but in November saw a request failure rate of 0.25%.

Four of November's top ten hosters run Linux, including Hurricane Electric, while three run FreeBSD. Two of the hosters run Windows Server 2003, while www.green.ch uses the F5 BIG-IP device.