In the December 2008 survey, we received responses from 186,727,854 sites. This total has grown by 1.56 million sites since last month.

Apache shows the largest growth this month, gaining a further 2.47 million sites. Just over half of this growth is due to the net hostname growth at ThePlanet.com, which once again includes a large number of .pl domains. Many of these new sites redirect to another site hosted by ThePlanet.com, which appears to offer PornTube videos, but in fact directs visitors towards a site which Google believes to be malware .

Yahoo! Traffic Server shows another large gain since it was uncloaked at Yahoo! last month. This month's survey now finds 1.68 million sites running on YTS, which is used exclusively by Yahoo! as a reverse proxy and connection management server for a number of its services.

nginx shows the 3rd largest growth this month, climbing by more than 10% to reach 3.35 million sites. This server now has nearly 1.8% of the worldwide market share — an impressive feat, given that it is the work of just one man, Igor Sysoev.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - December 2008

Total Sites Across All Domains, August 1995 - December 2008

Graph of market share for top servers across all domains, August 1995 - December 2008

Top Developers
Developer Nov-08 Share Dec-08 Share Change
Apache 93,207,591 50.34% 95,678,052 51.24% 0.90
Microsoft 63,871,279 34.49% 63,126,940 33.81% -0.69
Google 10,996,941 5.94% 10,455,103 5.60% -0.34
nginx 3,023,369 1.63% 3,354,329 1.80% 0.16
lighttpd 3,030,958 1.64% 3,046,333 1.63% -0.01
Posted by wss at 24 December 2008 in Web Server Survey | Print this Page
Rank Company site OS Outage
hh:mm:ss
Failed
Req%
DNS Connect First
byte
Total
1 DataPipe FreeBSD  0:00:00  0.005  0.038 0.019 0.039 0.039
2 www.aplus.net FreeBSD  0:00:00  0.005  0.154 0.068 0.227 9.232
3 iWeb.com Linux  0:00:00  0.005  0.005 0.071 0.142 0.142
4 www.westhost.com Linux  0:00:00  0.005  0.005 0.073 0.149 0.312
5 www.he.net Linux  0:00:00  0.005  0.005 0.073 0.153 0.227
6 Server Intellect Windows Server 2003  0:00:00  0.005  0.088 0.103 0.210 0.573
7 www.canadawebhosting.com Windows Server 2003  0:00:00  0.005  0.102 0.111 0.224 0.573
8 webhosting.tiscali.it Linux  0:00:00  0.005  0.024 0.135 0.271 0.554
9 Swishmail FreeBSD  0:00:00  0.010  0.007 0.059 0.120 0.308
10 New York Internet FreeBSD  0:00:00  0.010  0.013 0.062 0.127 0.297

See full table

DataPipe, Aplus.net, iWeb, WestHost, Hurricane Electric, Server Intellect, Canada Web Hosting and Tiscali are the most reliable hosting company sites for November 2008. Unusually, there are eight companies sharing the top spot this month, each showing only 1 failed request throughout November.

Of these eight companies, the top two by average connection time (DataPipe and Aplus.net) both use FreeBSD to run their main websites. In November, DataPipe was named among New Jersey's fastest growing companies.

Linux is used by four of November's most reliable hosting companies. This includes Montreal-based iWeb, which has been providing internet hosting infrastructure for 12 years, and WestHost, which has been providing web hosting for 10 years. Linux is also used by Hurricane Electric and Tiscali, both of which have already featured as the most reliable hosting companies earlier this year.

Two of this month's most reliable hosting companies use Windows Server 2003 to power their sites: Server Intellect is a privately owned company located in Florida and offers dedicated servers, shared hosting and virtual servers. Canada Web Hosting also uses Windows Server 2003 for its main site, but offers managed hosting on both Windows and Linux.

Posted by Paul Mutton at 16 December 2008 in Performance | Print this Page