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.

In the November 2011 survey, we received responses from 525,998,433 sites, giving a rise of 22 million (+4.3%) since last month.

Once again, all of the major web server vendors gained sites this month; however, Apache showed a greater rise of 15.9 million sites this time, allowing it to claw back some of the market share it lost last month. Microsoft showed the second largest absolute gain of 2.3 million sites, although this was not enough to prevent its market share falling by 0.21 percentage points. nginx also suffered a small loss in market share after reaching its all-time high of 8.54% last month.

In terms of active sites, Microsoft was the only major web server vendor to show a loss. Conversely, nginx made the largest gain, rising by 0.86 million active sites and bringing it to within 0.66 percentage points of Microsoft's market share. The total number of active sites in our survey now stands at 172 million.

In the October 2011 survey we received responses from 504,082,040 sites, a growth of nearly 3.8% or around 18M sites on last month.

All of the main web server vendors gained hostnames this month with Apache again showing the largest increase of just over 10M; however, it continues to lose a small amount of market share. A gain of just over 4M hostnames sees nginx increase market share to an all-time high of 8.5%.

This month Apache lost 86k active sites, less than 0.1% of its total. However, this translates to a more significant loss in market share of 1.09% due to all three of the main competitors gaining sites. The largest gain was seen by nginx, where an increase of just over 1.6M active sites resulted in its market share rising to 11.28%. If current trends continue nginx will soon overtake Microsoft to have the second largest number of active sites.

Across the million busiest sites Apache and Microsoft each lose market share this month whilst nginx and Google see small increases.

In the September 2011 survey we received responses from 485,173,671 sites, a growth of nearly 4.8% (just over 22M hostnames) compared to last month.

Apache servers saw the largest growth this month (roughly 14M new hostnames), taking its total to over 315M, yet it continued to lose market share. Apache now serves twice as many hostnames as this time last year.

Nearly a quarter of this growth comes from new sites seen at Softlayer. By the end of the year, Softlayer’s global network will include points of presence (PoPs) and data centers throughout Europe and Asia, with the goal of bringing Softlayer’s network within 40ms of everyone on the planet. Both BurstNet and AmeriNOC also saw growths of over a million hostnames.

Nginx had the biggest increase in market share, with a growth of 0.36 percentage points. This is the largest increase that we have seen for nginx since January. Nginx also continues to increase its share of active sites, gaining ground on Microsoft and remaining as the 2nd most popular open source webserver. Google on the other hand saw a moderate loss in active sites this month, down by nearly 3.8M.

In the August 2011 survey we received responses from 463,000,317 sites.

This month there has been a large increase in the number of sites found by the survey, which is now approaching half a billion hostnames. There were particularly large increases in the numbers of sites hosted by Softlayer, AmeriNOC, China Telecom, and the social networking communities Tumblr, Skyrock and Hyves.

Amazon also showed substantial growth and now hosts several million sites at its EC2 facility. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, allowing website owners to quickly rescale resources to meet demand. It has expanded significantly with a new data center recently opened in Tokyo, and is expected to have a revenue of $750M (Source: UBS via Business Week) this year.

However, even with the large increase in sites, the market share of the different server software has changed only a little. Of the leading web servers, just nginx gained share this month, whilst Apache, Microsoft and Google each showed small losses.