In the September 2008 survey we received responses from 181,277,835 sites. Of the 4.5 million sites that have been gained this month, more than three-quarters are using Apache.

Many of the new Apache sites are hosted at ThePlanet.com, which alone saw growth of 2.6 million sites. As has been the trend for the past few months, hundreds of thousands of the new sites at ThePlanet.com are link farms hosted on Polish (.pl) domain names and contain little more than pornographic text links to other sites within the same domain.

Further down the field, Resin grows significantly this month and is now found powering 343 thousand sites, making Resin the 12th most popular web server in the world. Resin is an application server product from Caucho Technology, which produces high performance open source Java and PHP solutions. Most of the new Resin-powered sites appeared at Panther IT Services, hosted in the Netherlands using .tk domains (Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand). Many of these sites use framesets to display TiKinet text link adverts at the top of the site's content.

SmugMug now contributes more than 18 thousand Apache sites to the Netcraft survey. These sites have the form nickname.smugmug.com and are used by SmugMug customers to display and sell their photographs via SmugMug's secure checkout.

SmugMug demonstrates an interesting mix of technologies, with the sites being hosted using the F5 BIG-IP device, and with more than half a petabyte of data being stored using Amazon S3. SmugMug also makes use of Amazon EC2 to process its customers' high resolution photos and videos. SmugMug has a partnership with Go Daddy to let power users register custom domain names which can be used to point to their galleries.