The November 2008 survey shows worldwide monthly growth of nearly three million websites, with responses now being received from a total of 185,167,897 sites.

Apache once again tops this month's growth, gaining 1.3 million sites to 93 million, but Microsoft-IIS follows closely gaining 1.1 million extra sites to reach 64 million. Google has grown by 509 thousand this month to approach the 11 million mark.

One interesting change this month is the appearance of 221,000 sites hosted by Yahoo! that now identify themselves as running on the Yahoo! Traffic Server proxy. Last month's survey found only 521 sites that claimed to be running on YTS.

Yahoo! is thought to use YTS to provide reverse proxy and connection management in a number of its services, although many of the company's sites were previously configured to omit the Server header in their HTTP responses. Yahoo! sites thought to use YTS include Bix, delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Groups.

Yahoo! Traffic Server is used to serve 12 billion requests per day. It was originally developed by Inktomi Corporation as a proxy cache for web traffic and streaming media. Websense acquired the technology behind Inktomi's proxy server, modifying it for use in their WebBlazer Web Threat Management System. Inktomi was then acquired by Yahoo! in 2002.

Domain name registrars and hosting companies may often find that they are unwittingly providing facilities for phishing.

Having access to timely, professionally validated alerts when phishing sites are deployed using their infrastructure is operationally efficient and responsible for both registrars and hosting companies, and an important part of preserving their company's reputation.

Netcraft produces a continuously updated phishing feed that is very widely used. At least three separate third party studies have found it to be the most comprehensive feed available.

Phishing sites are submitted to the feed by the Netcraft Toolbar community. Reporters range from individuals submitting phishing mails that they have personally received, to specialist security researchers and several of the largest banks and financial payment systems. All submissions are carefully validated before being added to the feed.

Over the last six months Netcraft has blocked over 110,000 distinct phishing sites [Apr - Oct 2008].

Registrars, hosting providers and ISPs are able to provide a footprint of their IP addresses, name servers and WHOIS servers, such that when we validate a phishing report, they receive an alert if the phishing site is using any aspect of their infrastructure.

Please contact us (sales@netcraft.com) for pricing or further details about any of our services.

Netcraft has developed a dataset which shows the hosting locations of the million busiest websites, as determined by visits from users of the Netcraft Toolbar.

The dataset gives a guide to the market share of companies hosting the sites responsible for the great majority of web traffic, and is uninfluenced by parked domains, personal sites, shared hosting accounts or the majority of blogs.

Although the top 1000 sites are concentrated amongst the web superpowers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and EBay, the hosting locations of the top million sites are widely fragmented, with a little over 3.25% sufficient for top spot.

The dataset is presented in an Excel spreadsheet and provides a variety of different filters and selections. Using the dataset, a hosting company can identify its relative position and closest competitors in each of the top 10,000, 100,000 and million tiers of site traffic, and also by region, country, and operating system.

Figure 1: Hosting company share within the top million sites

Figure 2: Hosting company share within the top thousand sites

green.ch is the most reliable hosting company site for October 2008. This is the only site that responded to every request made by Netcraft's performance collectors throughout the month.

With more than 70,000 customers, green.ch is one of the leading Swiss internet service providers for small and medium sized businesses. Originally known as agri.ch, the company was formed from a management buyout of the SME and Private Customer division of Cable & Wireless.

green.ch provides broadband internet access and uses its own data centre in Switzerland to focus on providing website hosting, email, SharePoint and VoIP telephony solutions.

green.ch uses Microsoft IIS 6.0 to serve its main site via an F5 BIG-IP device. The company also uses F5 BIG-IP for over 90% of its customers' websites, making green.ch the largest hoster of sites on F5 BIG-IP in Switzerland.

Linux is used by five of October's top ten hosting companies, while two use FreeBSD and Go Daddy uses Windows Server 2003.

Netcraft has developed a technique to identify movements of sites from one hosting provider to another on a monthly basis. Netcraft compares the hosting location of each site found by the Web Server Survey as indicated by the DNS with the equivalent information for the same site in the previous month.

Many sites’ location will be unchanged, but some will have moved from one hosting provider to another during the course of the month. Additionally, hosting companies may gain new sites that were not previously found by the survey, and lose expired sites which are no longer present in the Internet’s DNS.

Analysing this information in the aggregate presents a unique bird’s eye view of the hosting industry, identifying winners who are able to take sites from other hosting companies, and persuade people developing new sites to host those sites with them.

Using the dataset, a hosting company can see both where their new business came from, and the providers to whom it has lost business. One can also see the site switching information for any of the top thousand hosting providers on the Internet.