In the December 2007 survey we received responses from 155,230,051 sites. This is an increase of 5.4 million sites since last month, continuing the very strong growth seen during this year; the web has grown by nearly 50 million sites since December 2006.

This once again breaks the record for growth of the web in one year; the previous highest growth was 30 million sites in 2006. The growth is also impressive in percentage terms, with the web growing by 48% since last December — although this remains far less than the runaway growth of 160% seen back in 2000.

While there continues to be strong growth in the traditional hosting, the most dramatic growth this year has been the inclusion of ever larger numbers of sites at blogging service providers. The three largest alone — MySpace, Live Spaces and Blogger — now account for around 25 million sites in the survey. Both Microsoft and Google are attracting large numbers of users by integrating a range of services — search, online collaboration, blogging and electronic mail.

The growth in the number of active sites — an alternative measure that excludes parked domains and other templated sites — has also been impressive, with nearly 19 million new active sites since last December, for annual growth of 38%.

In the November 2007 survey we received responses from 149,784,002 sites. This is an increase of increase of 7.0M sites since last month, and represents growth of over 40 million sites since the start of the year.

Much of the growth in sites this year has come from the increasing number of blogging sites, in particular at Live Spaces, Blogger and MySpace. Instead this month, the growth mainly comes from traditional hosting providers, with large numbers of new domains at GI Partners and InterServer.

This reverses the trend in web server market share seen in recent months. Apache has seen its share seriously eroded by the blog providers (MySpace and Live Spaces use rival Microsoft IIS) during this year, but this month its share increases by 1%, taking it back to over 50% market share.

The number of active sites (which excludes parked and other templated sites) increases by a more modest 0.7 million this month. Apache also regains some ground here, rising to 47% market share and moving back to around a 10% lead over IIS.

In the October 2007 survey we received responses from 142,805,398 sites, an increase of 7.6 million sites since last month. This continues the strong gains seen last month, a rate of over 5% monthly growth, with MySpace, Microsoft Live.com, and Google's Blogger each gained over 1 million sites this month. Benefitting from the gains at MySpace and Microsoft Live, Microsoft-IIS now hosts over 50 million sites.

Apache loses 2.8% share this month, partly through the strong growth at the major blogging systems, and partly due to 2.5 million domains on Apache expiring at trouble-free.net. Apache has around a 10% market share advantage over IIS now, which is the smallest gap between the two since IIS was launched in 1996.

On the active sites measure which excludes templated sites, Apache gains 1 million sites this month, though this is eclipsed by growth of nearer 3 million for Microsoft-IIS.

In the September 2007 survey we received responses from 135,166,473 sites. This is an increase of 7.2 million sites since last month, the largest growth in the number of sites recorded by the survey. The rate of growth, around 5.5%, is high but not exceptional by historical standards.

The high growth so far this year has been largely driven by the increasing number of online blogging and social networking communities. This month sees strong growth in the number of sites at Windows Live Spaces, MySpace, and Blogger appearing in the survey. The increased popularity of these blog hosting services continues to have a dramatic effect on the web server market shares: Apache suffered a sudden decline in share when sites at Blogger switched to Google's GFE.

Apache gains over 3 million hostnames, and around 0.9 million active sites this month. But this is not enough to prevent its market share declining closer to the 50% mark, as Microsoft also gained over 3 million hostnames (a large part of which come from MySpace and Live Spaces, both of which use its Internet Information Server).

In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position.

The open source Apache has been the leading web server software since the March 1996 Netcraft Web Server Survey. In November 2005, Apache was found on 71 percent of web sites, putting it more than 50 percentage points ahead of Microsoft IIS (20.2 percent). At the time, Apache's market share advantage seemed insurmountable. But less than two years later, Microsoft has narrowed that 50 percent gap to 16.7 percent. The margin is even tighter in active sites, where Apache leads Microsoft by just 12.2 percent.

Apache's lead remains substantial in both categories. It's worth noting that Apache has lost market share to another open source server, lighttpd (1.2% of all sites), and Google (4.4%) as well as Windows. But if Microsoft continues to gain share at its current pace, it could close the gap on Apache sometime in 2008.