In the March 2009 survey, we received responses from 224,749,695 sites. This has brought the total up by more than 9 million sites, with QQ and Microsoft making the most significant contributions. Apache remains in the lead with a total of 104 million sites, while Microsoft-IIS's gain of 3.3 million sites (mostly consisting of new Windows Live blogs) brings its total up to 66 million.

After storming into the survey last month, this month sees QQ gain a further 8.9 million sites. QQ now hosts nearly 29 million Qzone sites under the qzone.qq.com domain, all of which are served by its own QZHTTP server. Little is known about this server, although people have noticed a similarity that suggests QZHTTP may be a customised version of thttpd.

Although it is generally uncommon for websites to use fake Server headers, there are some cases that stand out more than others. One relatively prevalent example is ZX_Spectrum/1997 (Sinclair_BASIC), which is used by a Russian company to serve 0.02% of the world's websites. The ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit personal home computer released in 1982, but it was discontinued two years before the World Wide Web even existed.

With almost a quarter of a billion websites found by this months survey, it is timely to show which web servers run the busiest sites on the web.

Using traffic data compiled by aggregating visits from the Netcraft Toolbar community, we have determined the web servers used by the million busiest websites on the Internet. Examining a fixed number of high traffic sites produces a less volatile view which is uninfluenced by parked domains or the majority of personal sites, shared hosting accounts and blogs.

The clear leader amongst web servers used by the million busiest websites is Apache with a 66% share. It has a 47% lead over its closest competitor, Microsoft-IIS, much greater than on the web as a whole.

New York Internet was the most reliable hosting company site during February 2009, failing to respond to only one of the requests made by Netcraft's performance collectors throughout the month.

New York Internet was closely followed by UK2, Server Intellect, WebFusion and Pair Networks; each of which failed to respond to two requests in February.

This month's victory marks a hat trick for New York Internet, which also came joint first in the previous two months: January and December.

Established in 1996, New York Internet is located in the heart of the Wall Street area and owns and maintains its own data centers. The company's core services include dedicated servers, colocation and virtual web hosting. The company's main website is served by Apache running on FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is used by three of February's most reliable hosting company sites, with another three using Linux and one using Windows Server 2003.