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.

In the June 2008 survey we received responses from 172,338,726 sites.

The total number of sites has increased by 3.9 million this month, with the largest gain being seen at ThePlanet.com, where 632,000 new sites maintain its position as the 6th largest hosting company in the world.

A large switch to the Bahamas was seen at Secure Hosting Limited, where 1.2 million sites were gained from Nameview Inc. The offshore hosting company offers web hosting and dedicated servers from its data centres located in the Bahamas and Jamaica, and even provides dual-homed hosting for a 100% uptime guarantee.

Most of the new sites at Secure Hosting Limited were using the Lighttpd web server both before and after the switch, so Lighttpd's market share remains fairly static this month. Microsoft's IIS web server grows by 2 million sites, boosting market share by 0.36%, but Apache remains in the lead with a total of 49.1%.

LiteSpeed loses more than 600 thousand sites during this survey, while nginx gains more than a million sites; more than doubling in numbers. The WordPress blogging system recently converted all of its load balancers to nginx, using the upstream hash module to serve 8-9 thousand requests per second. Netcraft's site report shows the main WordPress site switching from LiteSpeed to nginx in April. nginx is a web server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev.