In the November 2009 survey we received responses from 233,636,281 sites.

The largest share growth comes from nginx, with a 1.1 million increase again this month bringing its total up to 15 million. Over the past three months the number of nginx's sites has increased by 3.5 million, matching Apache for growth, and far surpassing Microsoft's 200k increase.

This month, the open source version control system, Subversion has formally submitted itself to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator. Each project makes substantial use of the other. Subversion uses Apache to make repositories available over the WebDAV/DeltaV protocol while Apache uses Subversion for versioning of the source code.

In the October 2009 survey, we received responses from 230,443,449 sites. Apache is responsible for more than 60% of this month's total growth of 4.3 million sites.

Apache gained 2.6 million sites in total, including 748 thousand new Apache sites at German hosting company Hetzner Online. Many of Hetzner's new sites are using the dyns.cx dynamic DNS service, which allows customers to use hostnames such as yourname.dyns.cx to point to IP addresses at Hetzner.

Despite Apache's overall growth, it suffered a loss of 646 thousand sites in the United States. This loss is largely attributable to The Planet, where 1.4 million expired hostnames resulted in a net loss of 706 thousand sites.

nginx showed significant growth again this month, with 1.1 million additional sites bringing its total up to 13.8 million. This web server software is particularly predominant at China Telecom, where it is used by more than 80% of their 7.9 million websites. China Telecom also showed the largest gain in nginx sites this month, contributing more than half a million sites to the worldwide gain of 1.1 million. 424 thousand of these new nginx sites belong to blogs at 163.com.

In the September 2009 survey we received responses from 226,099,841 sites, reflecting a modest rise of 149 thousand sites.

Taking the limelight this month is nginx, which gained 1.2 million sites, beating Apache's growth of 823 thousand. The popular Russian social networking site Vkontakte is the most popular nginx site appearing in Netcraft's million busiest sites. Other popular nginx sites include the comedic Fail Blog and I Can Has Cheezburger? sites, which are both WordPress blogs owned by Pet Holdings, Inc.

lighttpd suffers a significant loss this month, in stark contrast to its impressive growth last month which took its total up to more than two million sites. lighttpd has lost more than half of its sites since last month leaving its new total at 844 thousand. This drop was mainly due to the loss of 1 million sites on the tubely.com domain, which were hosted on the Amazon AWS service.

lighttpd promotes itself as a fast web server suitable for Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Meebo, with an event-driven architecture optimised for high performance AJAX applications.

In the August 2009 survey we received responses from 225,950,957 hostnames — 13.7M less than in July.

Much of the drop this month is due to the expiry of a large number of sites at The Planet, including 5 million sites in the .pl top-level domain all on one IP address, which were believed to be part of a linkfarm.

Lighttpd had a significant gain this month, rising to over two million sites, just under 1% of the survey. Lighttpd is a webserver designed for high performance environments. It has a small memory footprint, a large feature set and is licensed under a revised BSD license. Originally written by Jan Kneschke, Lighttpd is now maintained by a small team of developers, and now hosts a large number of popular and high traffic sites, including mininova.org and the controversial Pirate Bay.

In the February 2009 survey we received responses from 215,675,903 sites. This reflects a phenomenal monthly gain of more than 30 million sites, bringing the total up by more than 16%.