In the August 2010 survey we received responses from 213,458,815 sites.

This month saw four of the major web servers gaining hostnames but only two gaining market share.

Apache saw the largest increase again this month, gaining over 6.7M hostnames and pushing its share of the market above 56%, its highest share in 3 years. This large growth caused Microsoft to lose nearly 1 percentage point of market share despite gaining over 200k hostnames, mostly at China Telecom.

lighttpd has recovered from last month's losses, gaining 600k hostnames. After the massive drop of hostnames at SAVVIS in Australia, they have now partially recovered with the help of 200k new hostnames being served by lighttpd. Additionally iWeb Technologies Inc. have gained 300k hostnames pointing at lighttpd servers.

Google's share has dipped this month, losing 300k hostnames and a similar number of active sites.

In the July 2010 survey we received responses from 205,714,253 sites.

This month's results show that three of the six major web servers have gained hostnames in the last month, while the other three suffered losses.

The largest of these gains came from Apache, which saw an increase of over 1.1M hostnames.

Google's share has continued to increase, albeit at a slower rate than last month with just under 500k additional hostnames. This is due to increased activity on Blogger.

lighttpd suffered the largest overall loss this month, falling by 446k hostnames. This was caused by the loss of 690k hostnames at Savvis in Australia. Microsoft also experienced a loss this month, serving 648k fewer hostnames worldwide and also losing 265k active sites. A big contributor to this was a loss of 388k hostnames due to lower activity on Microsoft Live Spaces.

A backdoor has been discovered among a collection of security testing tools for Firefox.

The rogue Mozilla Sniffer add-on was included in the Web Application Security Penetration Testing collection. This set of tools is popular within the security community, as it simplifies the process of discovering vulnerabilities in web applications.

However, using the Mozilla Sniffer add-on would have introduced an unexpected vulnerability in any application being tested — whenever a login form was submitted, the add-on secretly sent a copy of the URL, password and other details to an IP address presumably controlled by the malicious author.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies' own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

In the June 2010 survey we received responses from 206,956,723 sites.

This month's numbers show a mixed picture with two of the five major web servers gaining hostnames in the last month and the other three recording losses.  A similar trend was recorded for active sites.

The largest increase in the number of hostnames served was for Google, which gained 3M due to increased activity at Blogger. The other web server to do better this month than last was Microsoft which served 1.8M more hostnames, 1.2M in the United States.  This was not the result of a single increase, but  significant growth at Microsoft Corp, GoDaddy Inc and VPLS Inc.

nginx was the largest overall loser of hostnames, serving 2.2M fewer than last month. 1.6M of this loss came in China as a result of drops at China Telecom, China Unicom and the Data Communications Bureau of Tianjin Province; the result of stale blogs at sohu.com, blogbus.com and hexun.com being expired from the survey.

Apache served 871k fewer hostnames worldwide and although not the largest overall loser, this figure actually masks much larger changes that occurred in individual countries.  The most significant took place in opposing directions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Apache served 2M more hostnames in the UK this month as a result of colossal growth at Real International Business Co, which saw an increase of more than 1.9M hostnames. However, all of the new hostnames attributed to them in the survey resolve to a single IP address. Meanwhile, in the US, Apache lost 3M hostnames at ThePlanet.com resulting in an overall loss of 2.5M in the country. The vast majority of these expired sites are due to Netcraft expiring stale accounts on the xorg.pl redirection service out of the survey.