In the June 2009 survey we received responses from 238,027,855 sites, an increase of 2,137,329 on last month. A reduction in activity at Microsoft Live Spaces was responsible for the large drop in the number of Microsoft-IIS sites detected. Apache retains the dominant market share of 47.12%, approximately 112.2 million sites in total, and saw a modest increase in market share of 0.63 percentage points this month.

Meanwhile, Google has increased its market share by 1.3 percentage points to nearly 12 million sites, due mainly to increased activity on Blogger.

nginx continues to grow strongly, increasing its market share by 1 percentage point. It gains around 2.5 million sites this month, mostly due to more activity seen by the survey on blogging provider NetEase. nginx is also used by Wordpress.com, where Netcraft saw 180,000 more active blogs this month.

In the May 2009 survey we received responses from 235,890,526 sites, an increase of 4.3 million on last month. Apache remains firmly in the lead, having gained 3.3 million sites, and Microsoft-IIS remains second, having lost almost 0.9 million (mostly due to less activity seen at accounts on Microsoft's own Live Spaces service). QQ.com, the popular IM service in China, remains third with 29M sites. Google takes fourth place, after gaining approximately 1.5 million sites, and remains ahead of nginx which gained 200,000.

The Russian nginx web server web server nginx has been steadily increasing in popularity for several years. The chart below shows the geographical distribution of sites using nginx and in particular illustrates that China now has the most nginx sites, with almost 2.5 million and that the US is close behind with almost 2.4 million.

nginx was written by Igor Sysoev and is well known for its rich feature set and low resource consumption.

In the April 2009 survey we received responses from 231,510,169 sites. This represents an increase of over 6 million sites when compared with last month, with Google and nginx accounting for almost all of the changes. Apache remains in the lead, as it has since 1996, with a total of over 106 million sites, followed by Microsoft-IIS with over 67 million and QQ with almost 29 million.

Some interesting language specific servers which can be seen in this month's survey include the Ruby application server Mongrel, with just over 41 thousand sites, and the python based Zope with almost 46 thousand. The Pike and C based Caudium has almost 14 thousand sites, the Erlang based Yaws has about 70, and a newcomer, Salvia, which is a lightweight web server framework written in Haskell, has one.

Following on from last month's mention of fake server headers, where we saw the venerable ZX_Spectrum/1997 (Sinclair_BASIC), this month we have hi, appearing as the server banner for twitter, which is currently the 432nd most popular site amongst our toolbar community.

In the March 2009 survey, we received responses from 224,749,695 sites. This has brought the total up by more than 9 million sites, with QQ and Microsoft making the most significant contributions. Apache remains in the lead with a total of 104 million sites, while Microsoft-IIS's gain of 3.3 million sites (mostly consisting of new Windows Live blogs) brings its total up to 66 million.

After storming into the survey last month, this month sees QQ gain a further 8.9 million sites. QQ now hosts nearly 29 million Qzone sites under the qzone.qq.com domain, all of which are served by its own QZHTTP server. Little is known about this server, although people have noticed a similarity that suggests QZHTTP may be a customised version of thttpd.

Although it is generally uncommon for websites to use fake Server headers, there are some cases that stand out more than others. One relatively prevalent example is ZX_Spectrum/1997 (Sinclair_BASIC), which is used by a Russian company to serve 0.02% of the world's websites. The ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit personal home computer released in 1982, but it was discontinued two years before the World Wide Web even existed.

With almost a quarter of a billion websites found by this months survey, it is timely to show which web servers run the busiest sites on the web.

Using traffic data compiled by aggregating visits from the Netcraft Toolbar community, we have determined the web servers used by the million busiest websites on the Internet. Examining a fixed number of high traffic sites produces a less volatile view which is uninfluenced by parked domains or the majority of personal sites, shared hosting accounts and blogs.

The clear leader amongst web servers used by the million busiest websites is Apache with a 66% share. It has a 47% lead over its closest competitor, Microsoft-IIS, much greater than on the web as a whole.

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%.

In the January 2009 survey we received responses from 185,497,213 sites, reflecting an uncharacteristic monthly loss of 1.23 million sites.