The November 2008 survey shows worldwide monthly growth of nearly three million websites, with responses now being received from a total of 185,167,897 sites.

Apache once again tops this month's growth, gaining 1.3 million sites to 93 million, but Microsoft-IIS follows closely gaining 1.1 million extra sites to reach 64 million. Google has grown by 509 thousand this month to approach the 11 million mark.

One interesting change this month is the appearance of 221,000 sites hosted by Yahoo! that now identify themselves as running on the Yahoo! Traffic Server proxy. Last month's survey found only 521 sites that claimed to be running on YTS.

Yahoo! is thought to use YTS to provide reverse proxy and connection management in a number of its services, although many of the company's sites were previously configured to omit the Server header in their HTTP responses. Yahoo! sites thought to use YTS include Bix, delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Groups.

Yahoo! Traffic Server is used to serve 12 billion requests per day. It was originally developed by Inktomi Corporation as a proxy cache for web traffic and streaming media. Websense acquired the technology behind Inktomi's proxy server, modifying it for use in their WebBlazer Web Threat Management System. Inktomi was then acquired by Yahoo! in 2002.

In the October 2008 survey we received responses from 182,226,259 sites, which reflects growth of 948 thousand since last month.

Apache once again shows the largest growth, gaining 463 thousand sites this month. ThePlanet.com gains 1.3 million sites this month — nearly all of which are running on Apache — but this includes a large number of 'link farm' sites that use .pl domains to propagate search terms using pornographic phrases.

Google shows the next largest growth and boosts its total by 411 thousand sites. Google now runs 10.5 million sites on its own webserver software, which is used to host its own services in addition to user-generated applications and blogs. Some server names include:

• GFE/1.3, which is used by Google's Blogger service to publish third party blogs under the blogspot.com domain, and spreadsheets and other documents under docs.google.com.
• GWS-GRFE/0.50, which runs Google Groups.
• gws. This simple, lowercase name is used by Google's main search site at google.com and Google Image Search.
• Google Frontend, which is used to run third party applications on Google App Engine (often using the appspot.com domain) and Google Mashups.

In the September 2008 survey we received responses from 181,277,835 sites. Of the 4.5 million sites that have been gained this month, more than three-quarters are using Apache.

Many of the new Apache sites are hosted at ThePlanet.com, which alone saw growth of 2.6 million sites. As has been the trend for the past few months, hundreds of thousands of the new sites at ThePlanet.com are link farms hosted on Polish (.pl) domain names and contain little more than pornographic text links to other sites within the same domain.

Further down the field, Resin grows significantly this month and is now found powering 343 thousand sites, making Resin the 12th most popular web server in the world. Resin is an application server product from Caucho Technology, which produces high performance open source Java and PHP solutions. Most of the new Resin-powered sites appeared at Panther IT Services, hosted in the Netherlands using .tk domains (Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand). Many of these sites use framesets to display TiKinet text link adverts at the top of the site's content.

SmugMug now contributes more than 18 thousand Apache sites to the Netcraft survey. These sites have the form nickname.smugmug.com and are used by SmugMug customers to display and sell their photographs via SmugMug's secure checkout.

SmugMug demonstrates an interesting mix of technologies, with the sites being hosted using the F5 BIG-IP device, and with more than half a petabyte of data being stored using Amazon S3. SmugMug also makes use of Amazon EC2 to process its customers' high resolution photos and videos. SmugMug has a partnership with Go Daddy to let power users register custom domain names which can be used to point to their galleries.

In the August 2008 survey we received responses from 176,748,506 sites. This month's overall growth of 1.3 million sites reflects Apache's growth of 1.2 million and Google's gain of half a million sites, but a loss of 760 thousand sites using Microsoft IIS.

Aside from Apache's and Google's leading growth, Igor Sysoev's nginx shows the next largest gain, climbing by 170 thousand sites to a new total of 2.4 million and retaining its position as the 5th largest web server vendor.

LiteSpeed also shows strong growth this month, more than tripling the number of sites that run on this web server. Most of this growth is seen at the German company Hetzner Online, which remains the largest host of LiteSpeed sites. LiteSpeed is now used by 160 thousand sites around the world, which has taken it up to be the 16th most popular web server.

In the July 2008 survey we received responses from 175,480,931 sites. The web has grown by 3.14 million sites over the past month, with Apache web servers increasing by 2.2 million and Microsoft IIS by 1.4 million.

Particularly strong growth is seen in lighttpd, which nearly doubles its total this month, rising from 1.5 million to 2.9 million and increasing its market share to 1.68%. lighttpd has overtaken nginx and Oversee to become the 4th most popular web server in the world. Users of lighttpd include YouTube, Wikipedia and the IM service meebo.

Much of this month's Apache growth was seen at ThePlanet.com, which gained 1.9 million further sites running on Apache. More than 95% of the sites hosted by ThePlanet.com now use Apache. Earlier this month, ThePlanet.com launched an enterprise-class managed hosting service under the branding of Planet Northstar, alongside dedicated servers under their new Planet Alpha branding.