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.

In the May 2010 survey we received responses from 206,026,787 sites.

Four of the five major web servers gained hostnames since last month. Google lost for the second month in a row with a drop of 1.4M hostnames, predominantly caused by expired sites in its blogging system.

Although Microsoft served 780K more hostnames this month, it actually lost 235K active sites. As with Google, this was due to a significant loss of blogging sites.

The biggest change this month was a 1.9M increase in hostnames served using Apache. The largest contributor to this was a growth of 561K sites by Next Dimension Inc, but the majority of this consisted of parked sites on a single IP address.

Rackspace recently reported that cloud computing sales were predicted to hit £8.5 billion ($12.6 bn) by 2014. Netcraft has seen significant growth in this sector. The number of sites hosted on Amazon EC2 increased for the eighth month in a row. There were 365K Amazon cloud sites in this month's survey, a growth of 33% since December 2009.

One of the busiest sites hosted on Amazon EC2 as determined by visits from the Netcraft Toolbar is www.farmville.com. With over 75 million users, Farmville is a game available through Facebook in which players can grow crops and raise livestock.

In the April 2010 survey we received responses from 205,368,103 sites — a slight fall in the number of sites found.

Three of the five major web servers lost hostnames compared to last month. The two servers to gain sites in the April survey are Microsoft, with over half a million more sites than in March, and nginx with just over 300k new sites. For nginx this reverses the trend of the last three months, when it lost sites due to stale WordPress blogs being expired from the survey.

The survey results this month also show how Chile's internet infrastructure has been affected by the earthquakes which hit the country at the end of February and beginning of March. The two major earthquakes had magnitudes of 8.8 and 6.9 respectively and it is estimated that they took out up to 60% of networks. Despite the scale of the disaster, the number of hostnames seen in Chile this month fell by only 12%.

In the March 2010 survey we received responses from 206,675,938 sites.

This represents a slight fall in the number of hostnames seen since last month and consequently most of the major web servers experienced small losses in hostnames relative to the February 2010 survey: only lighttpd and Google gained hostnames, with increases of 560k and 275k respectively. The overall gain for lighttpd originates from 785k parked hostnames at SAVVIS in Australia, catapulting the proportion of hostnames using lighttpd in the country from 2.29% in February to 37.80% this month.

For the third month in a row nginx lost sites, recording 1.3M fewer hostnames in March than in February. This is again due to losses from Wordpress as stale blogs continue to be expired from the survey. nginx also lost in terms of active sites (down 1.2M since last month) while the other major web servers saw minor gains in this metric.

In the February 2010 survey we received responses from 207,316,960 sites.

The biggest change of the month belongs to Apache with a 1.6M increase in hostnames. It was closely followed by Microsoft which saw a growth of 1.1M.

After a year long consistent rise nginx is experiencing a loss for a second month in a row as inactive weblogs on WordPress and 163.com are expired out of the survey. This month nginx had a decrease of 1.5M hostnames, which brings its total down to the number of hostnames it had in October.

China Internet Network Information Center has recently announced a change in the .cn domain name registration regulations. Since December 14th individuals can no longer register .cn domains and a paper application has to be submitted to register one along with photocopies of the company business license and registrant ID. While this has reduced the frequency of .cn domains in spam, it does not seem to have affected the growth of the domain. Netcraft has discovered 49k new hostnames in .cn this month, compared to 37k in December, 59k in November and 39k in October.

In the January 2010 survey we received responses from 206,741,990 sites.

The biggest change this month is that 30M hostnames at qq.com expired from the survey. Last year all qq.com blogs were made public, leading to a large number of hostnames being added to the survey in February 2009. However, in the last 6 months qq.com have from time to time made all blogs private again, and have also stopped reporting blog activity to well known syndication points, so Netcraft can no longer tell how many accounts are active.

The market share for all the other major web servers has increased. Apache gained approximately 3M hostnames compared to the December 2009 survey, bringing their total to 111.3M. In second place comes Microsoft with a 600k increase. nginx lost hostnames this month but grew substantially in active sites, gaining 2.7M.

In the December 2009 survey we received responses from 233,848,493 sites, an increase of 212k since last month.

nginx continues to experience substantial absolute growth, increasing by 1.3M hostnames, which was the biggest gain this month.

Over the last 12 months, nginx has shown the most consistent growth out of all of the top Server Vendors, seeing only a small loss in February. Since this time last year, it has grown by 12.9M hostnames, which is only slightly below that of Apache's growth of 13.3M. In terms of market share, however, Apache has actually lost 4.7% this year, whereas nginx has seen a large increase, gaining 5.2% over the year.

In total we have seen an increase of 47M hostnames and 7M active sites over the last 12 months.

In the November 2009 survey we received responses from 233,636,281 sites.

The largest share growth comes from nginx, with a 1.1 million increase again this month bringing its total up to 15 million. Over the past three months the number of nginx's sites has increased by 3.5 million, matching Apache for growth, and far surpassing Microsoft's 200k increase.

This month, the open source version control system, Subversion has formally submitted itself to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator. Each project makes substantial use of the other. Subversion uses Apache to make repositories available over the WebDAV/DeltaV protocol while Apache uses Subversion for versioning of the source code.

In the October 2009 survey, we received responses from 230,443,449 sites. Apache is responsible for more than 60% of this month's total growth of 4.3 million sites.

Apache gained 2.6 million sites in total, including 748 thousand new Apache sites at German hosting company Hetzner Online. Many of Hetzner's new sites are using the dyns.cx dynamic DNS service, which allows customers to use hostnames such as yourname.dyns.cx to point to IP addresses at Hetzner.

Despite Apache's overall growth, it suffered a loss of 646 thousand sites in the United States. This loss is largely attributable to The Planet, where 1.4 million expired hostnames resulted in a net loss of 706 thousand sites.

nginx showed significant growth again this month, with 1.1 million additional sites bringing its total up to 13.8 million. This web server software is particularly predominant at China Telecom, where it is used by more than 80% of their 7.9 million websites. China Telecom also showed the largest gain in nginx sites this month, contributing more than half a million sites to the worldwide gain of 1.1 million. 424 thousand of these new nginx sites belong to blogs at 163.com.