Dallas based hosting company ThePlanet has, in terms of percentage growth in active sites, been the fastest growing large hosting company over the last six months.

A table of the Hosting Providers who grew the fastest over the 6 months to October 2003 is provided below. Companies are included in the filter if they started April 2003 with more than 10,000 active sites (as this removes those which grew simply through starting with a small base), and had growth of more than 50% over the period.

Fastest Growing Hosting Providers by % Increase in Active Sites April 2003 to October 2003 Parent Company Apr-03 Oct-03 % Change Hostnames Oct 03 ThePlanet.com 15,923 48,522 204.73% 71,975 EV1Servers.net 208,531 355,932 70.69% 550,808 iPowerWeb 70,622 117,127 65.85% 139,586 SRS Sakura Internet Inc 18,922 29,661 56.75% 36,085 VenturesOnline Inc 23,270 35,703 53.43% 51,045 Lycos 48,400 73,988 52.87% 134,499

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Earlier this month 1&1 Internet extended its operations into the US opening a datacenter in St. Louis, and launching its services with a shared hosting plan that is free for the first three years.

As often, opinions in the hosting forums are all over the place on the impact of 1&1’s offer, ranging from” the end of the American hosting industry as we’ve known it” to “they’ll close within a year”.

It was surprising how many people in the US hosting industry simply hadn’t heard of 1&1. In terms of hostnames found by the Web Server Survey, 1&1 is the largest hoster in the world by a margin, and hosts fully 18% of the hostnames in Europe, making it plain why they felt the need to expand into the US.

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After August, which contained the Blaster Worm, the SoBig Virus, and the North East US/Canada power outage, September was a much more benign month for the internet, with the top two sites showing remarkable reliability.

Just one of the 2976 requests made from our five performance measurement points to the British Telecom site failed, and only two out of 2976 requests failed to the Dell Host site.

These are the most reliable statistics that have been posted to date on a calendar month basis, and also the first time that a site running Windows has been placed top.

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In the October 2003 survey we received responses from 43,700,759 sites.

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - October 2003

Top Developers

Developer	September 2003	Percent	October 2003	Percent	Change
Apache	27836622	64.52	28235972	64.61	0.09
Microsoft	10156289	23.54	10252227	23.46	-0.08
SunONE	1501241	3.48	1528090	3.50	0.02
Zeus	742950	1.72	735179	1.68	-0.04

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Since Verisign wildcarded the .com and .net Top Level Domains [TLDs], some people have become concerned that this might pollute the results of the Web Server Survey, eventually reaching the situation when 99.9% of the hostnames found are running Linux and Apache - Verisign's platform of choice for the site to which they redirect otherwise unresolved requests.

However, Verisign was not the first TLD operator to think of wildcarding their domains, and we already maintain a mechanism for preventing hostnames that resolve to the ip addresses of these wildcarding systems from being included in the survey. (more...)