In the October 2012 survey we received responses from 620,480,777 sites, an increase of 350K sites since last month's survey.

In spite of this, all major web server vendors lost hostnames this month with the exception of Microsoft – gaining around 3.5M – with a 0.58% rise in market share. This continues Apache's decline in market share, with a drop of 0.49 percentage points from last month.

In terms of active sites, all of the major vendors made losses. In terms of market share, both Microsoft and Apache made small gains, 0.5 percentage points for Apache compared with 0.1% for Microsoft.

In the top million busiest sites, nginx made modest gains in market share. Microsoft, Apache and Google all lost sites. This continues the downward trend on from last month for both Apache and Google, with Apache falling further back from the 60% threshold that it hit in August.

Although Apache dominates the overall market, where it is used by 58% of all websites, the secure server market paints a very different picture. Netcraft's SSL Survey found 2.3 million distinct, valid third-party certificates being used by HTTPS websites in October. Apache and Microsoft are almost neck and neck with 41.6% and 40.8% of the secure market share respectively, with the latter being noticeably higher than Microsoft's 15.7% share amongst HTTP sites.

Usage of nginx is also significantly different between the HTTPS and HTTP markets: although it is used by 11.9% of all sites in the Web Server Survey, it is used to serve only 2.3% of SSL certificates.

This month 516k hostnames moved from FC2 to Amazon, contributing to a net gain of 342k. FC2 is a provider of free ad-supported blogs and other web-based blogging tools. However, as many of these blogs are inactive, this change did not lead to an overall increase in the number of active sites hosted by Amazon.

Nasdaq has announced that it plans to make use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power its new financial data management system, which retains data required for financial regulation. This can be seen as a sign that large organisations are becoming more willing to make use of third party cloud offerings to host their data systems, and that the benefits associated with cloud-based solutions (low cost and high scalability) are increasingly outweighing the risks (security and accountability concerns). This follows Amazon becoming the largest hosting location last month. The quantity of web-facing computers owned by Amazon increased a further 5% this month.

In the September 2012 survey we received responses from 620,132,319 sites, a decrease of 8M sites since last month's survey.

A large portion of this drop was caused by a large network of linkfarmed domains disappearing from under the .com TLD, causing Apache numbers to suffer the most, with a loss of 10M sites. This resulted in a small drop in Apache's market share to 58%. Google also saw losses of 1M sites, but both Microsoft and nginx gained, with 840k and 1.5M new domains respectively.

Server headers for IIS 8.0 – the latest version of Microsoft's server software – were returned by 1,723 sites this month. This is an increase of 1,445 sites (+519%) over the six months since the public beta release of Windows Server 2012 in April, which uses IIS 8.0 as its default web server. However, only twelve of the million busiest sites were found to be using the software, seven of which are within Microsoft's own iis.net.

Amazon reached a significant milestone this month, with its strong and continued growth in the web hosting market now making it the world's largest hosting location by number of web-facing computers. The previous leader was China Telecom, which now has 116k web-facing computers against Amazon's 118k.

Netcraft's hosting provider server count uses a set of heuristics to identify individual computers, regardless of how many web-facing IP addresses each may have, or how many websites they serve.

Amazon has nearly doubled its count of web-facing computers within the past year, and this growth does not look set to slow down any time soon. The majority of these computers are located in the US (77%) and Ireland (13%), although smaller numbers of servers have started popping up in other locations within the past year, including the Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, and Japan.

Although Amazon has the largest number of web-facing computers, these are used to host a relatively modest sum of 6.8M websites. 2.9M of these sites are served by nginx, which is closely followed by 2.3M served by Apache. A further 410k are served by Polyvore Web Server, which is used by sites within the Polyvore fashion social-commerce network. Only 2.4% (163k) of the sites hosted at Amazon are running Microsoft IIS.

Although Amazon's scalable, pay-as-you-go EC2 service supports Microsoft Windows, Linux is by far the most popular operating system to be found amongst all of its web-facing computers, including those used by CloudFront and S3. Nearly 97% of Amazon's web-facing computers were running Linux during September's survey.

In the August 2012 survey we received responses from 628,170,204 sites, a decrease of 38M sites since last month's survey.

Once again, this month's drop comes as a result of improvements to the survey's handling of wildcard hostnames, with over 40M hostnames on only 242 IP addresses being removed from the Survey. This has again had a negative effect on the number of hostnames running on Apache, with 36M hostnames lost, taking its market share down to 59%. This meant that despite Microsoft, nginx and Google losing hostnames (855k, 1.4M and 370k respectively), they all increased their percentage share.

In the Million busiest sites, the situation was reversed. Apache gained 15k sites to lift its share past the 60% threshold. Microsoft, nginx and Google all saw losses, by 4k, 10k and 2k respectively.

6^th June 2012 saw the World IPv6 Launch, an event organised to build on World IPv6 Day (held a year ago). This year, the event focused on bringing together major internet technology firms to 'permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services'. The effect of the day was clearly visible in the Survey, with the number of IPv6 enabled hostnames jumping by over 300% from 7M to 30M.

Apple's decision to migrate MobileMe accounts to its new iCloud service has meant that Akamai experienced a 138k drop in active sites in the Survey. The MobileMe service allowed users to publish data to a page on the me.com site or their own domain. The new iCloud services don't offer users the same functionality.

Change Y-axis scale

In the July 2012 survey we received responses from 665,916,461 sites, a decrease of 31M since last month.

This drop comes as a result of the loss of a large number of wildcard hostnames with similar content at AmeriNOC (-30M), Axoft Group (-10M), and Tailor Made Servers (-8M). All of these sites were running Apache, resulting in a decrease of 39M hostnames running on Apache and dropping its market share slightly to 61%. All other web server vendors gained hostnames this month, with the biggest increase being 1.5M hostnames running on Microsoft IIS. This was followed by nginx and lighttpd with increases of 950k and 800k hostnames respectively.

Within Netcraft’s million busiest websites, nginx experienced a jump in market share this month to 12.5% after an increase of 22k sites. Nginx also saw the biggest switch of hostnames, with about.com changing around 600 top-million hostnames from Apache, the most popular of these being pcsupport.about.com. Nginx now stands nearly 1 percentage point of market share behind Microsoft. Apache and Microsoft both saw losses within the top million, of 32k and 10k respectively.

In the June 2012 survey we received responses from 697,089,482 sites, a growth of 5.1% or 34M sites since last month.

All major web server vendors experienced an increase in hostnames this month. After a loss of 17.5M hostnames last month Apache saw the largest growth this month with an increase of 22.8M hostnames. The second largest growth was seen by Microsoft with an increase of 3.5M hostnames. This, however, still resulted in a loss in the market share for Microsoft. nginx, after nine consecutive months of market share growth, also experienced a loss in market share albeit gaining 2.1M hostnames.

The 6th of June 2012 is the World IPv6 launch day. The event is organized by the Internet Society and it is aiming to promote the widespread usage of the protocol. This month's survey received IPv6 AAAA results for over 7M hostnames, mapping to 105k distinct IPv6 addresses. Apache was found running on the majority of these hostnames (6.2M), followed by nginx with 398k hostnames.