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.