In the April 2012 survey we received responses from 676,919,707 sites, giving a rise of 32.6M hostnames (5.1%) since last month.

Apache saw the largest growth (22.8M) and increased its market share to 65.5%. nginx, with the second largest growth (4.5M), increased its total to 69.9M. Microsoft had a greater increase in hostnames this month (+3.5M) compared to March, however still experienced a small loss in market share.

Microsoft's new server operating system, codenamed Windows Server 8, which was released to MSDN subscribers in September 2011 has now been made available as a public beta. Microsoft-IIS/8.0 is the default web server on Windows Server 8, and the April 2012 survey found 278 sites with this server header. However, many of these sites are running on Linux, indicating proxy servers or forged server headers. The first sites deploying Windows Server 8 include iis.net, phponwindows.net, and a Microsoft corporate remote access service. Indicative of an early beta, many installations are on isolated broadband connections, rather than at large hosting providers.

In the March 2012 survey we received responses from 644,275,754 sites, giving a rise of 31.4M hostnames (5.1%) since last month.

Apache continued to gain hostnames this month with a growth of 22.5M and, contrary to last month, was able to increase its market share by a third of a percentage point. nginx had another good month and experienced an increase of 4.7M hostnames or 7.82%. With all other major web server vendors showing higher growth than Microsoft's 761k increase, Microsoft recorded a drop in market share of half a percentage point. The gap between Microsoft and nginx now stands at 23.6M hostnames.

Amongst the Million Busiest Sites, Apache again suffered a small drop in market share this month, losing 1,700 sites, extending a trend that dates back to August 2011. Microsoft gained 110 sites making this the first time it has recorded an increase since June 2010. nginx continued to increase its market share and gained 1.2k sites, whilst Google suffered a small loss of 289 sites.

In the February 2012 survey we received responses from 612,843,429 sites. Compared to January, this represents an increase of 30M hostnames or +5.2%.

nginx was the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month, gaining 0.27 percentage points. Apache did experience a growth of 19M hostnames, but its market share has remained static, while Microsoft and Google had a small drop in market share despite gaining 3.9M and 450K hostnames respectively.

Within the Million Busiest Sites nginx continued its steady growth; gaining just over 12K new sites. Apache saw the biggest loss this month with a drop of 18K hostnames.

The Resin application server has been experiencing strong growth over the past 12 months; seeing an almost tenfold growth from 480k hostnames in February 2011 to 4.7M or 0.77% of the market in February 2012. Resin is a Java application server from Caucho which is used on a number of the Million Busiest Sites, including Bebo — now recovered from its outage last week.

In the January 2012 survey we received responses from 582,716,657 sites, a growth of 4.9% or 27.2M sites on last month.

All major web server vendors have continued to gain hostnames this month with Apache, once again, achieving the largest increase of just under 16M hostnames. Despite this, Apache's market share fell by 0.3%, negating the increase experienced last month. Although Microsoft gained 1.8M sites it recorded a further drop in market share, extending a trend that dates back as far as June 2010. Conversely, nginx was the only major web server vendor to gain market share this month and set a new all-time high of 9.63%. Furthermore, it saw the second largest absolute growth with an addition of 6.9M hostnames.

In terms of Active Sites, nginx gained 1.9M which resulted in it overtaking Microsoft to have the second largest number of Active Sites (22.2M). Apache experienced the greatest rise this month with an addition of 3.7M Active Sites, more than double the increase it recorded last month.

Across the million busiest sites, Apache and Microsoft both lost market share this month whilst nginx and Google saw a small increase.

In the December 2011 survey we received responses from 555,482,744 sites, giving a rise of 29.5 million (+5.6%) since last month.

Since June all major web server vendors have continuously gained hostnames. This month Apache saw, once again, the largest increase of just over 20M hostnames, which is the largest gain for Apache in five months. The second largest growth was seen by Microsoft, with a gain of 1.2M; however, this still resulted in Microsoft losing market share. nginx, on the other hand, successfully recovered from its recent loss bringing the web server vendor to another all-time high of 8.85% market share.

All server vendors also saw an increase in Active Sites this month. Apache experienced the largest increase with a gain of nearly 1.5M sites. Microsoft also gained 0.5M Active Sites increasing its market share advantage over its close rival nginx by 0.7 percentage points. The total number of Active Sites in our survey now stands at 175 million.