The hosting industry's sustained growth has grabbed the attention of Wall Street, which has steered clear of the sector in recent years. That interest is likely to spur a fresh round of financings and deals, according to investment bankers.

"Investment dollars are definitely looking to go to work in the hosting space," said Peter Hopper, president of DH Capital LLC, a New York-based investment firm specializing in the hosting sector. "This is very different from a couple of years ago. The capital is starting to flow back in. There's no question about that."

Hopper spoke at Monday at HostingCon.2005, a two-day event which drew nearly 600 hosting professionals to the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago. Hopper noted that investor sentiment on hosting had been shaped by the bankruptcies of the dot-com boom years. "That view is beginning to change," said Hopper. "There are a lot of private companies that are getting huge and knocking the cover off the ball." That improved outlook is likely to mean more mergers and acquisitions, and an improved environment for hosting companies seeking to raise funding through private investment or even public stock offerings.

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Mandy Davis and Rich Miller from Netcraft will be attending HostingCon, in Chicago next Monday and Tuesday June 6-7th. We're looking forward to meeting with customers and the hosting industry generally. If you would like to meet up, please mail us and let us know the best way to get in touch with you at the show, and times you have available to meet.

HostingCon features 28 sessions on industry issues, as well as keynote addresses by Robert Marsh (CEO, EV1Servers), Sandip Gupta (CEO, Ensim Corporation), Serguei Beloussov (CEO, SWsoft) and Pascal Martin (GM for Hosting Solutions, Microsoft).

Hostway and Energis share the top slot as as the most reliable hosting companies site this month, followed by Go Daddy, Datapipe, INetU and France Telecom. Hostway, which is based in Chicago and has operations in six countries, was also the most reliable hoster in April 2005. Energis provides connectivity to Netcraft, but has no particular advantage over any other hosting company site in the performance analysis, as none of the performance data collection machines are on the Energis network.

Notably half of this month's top 10 are running Windows. Recent months have seen a real mixture of operating systems in use on the most reliable sites, in contrast to the early months when FreeBSD dominated the upper end of the table.

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In the June 2005 survey we received responses from 64,808,485 sites, an increase of 1.27 million from last month's survey. In the first six months of the year, the Internet has added 7.83 million sites, a pace which approaches the torrid growth rate of 2000, when the Web added 16.1 million sites. By comparison, the survey added 10.4 million sites in 2003 and 10.9 million in 2004.

The bulk of this year's growth has occurred in the United States, with a gain of 5.14 million hostnames. Other countries with strong growth in the survey thus far in 2005 include Germany (+575K), The United Kingdom (+436K), South Korea (+237.9K) and Sweden (+143K).

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - June 2005

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - June 2005

Top Developers

Developer	May 2005	Percent	June 2005	Percent	Change
Apache	44072262	69.37	45172895	69.70	0.33
Microsoft	13049346	20.54	13131361	20.26	-0.28
Sun	1856222	2.92	1849471	2.85	-0.07
Zeus	562614	0.89	580844	0.90	0.01

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A version of the Netcraft Toolbar for the Firefox web browser is now available.

The toolbar runs on any operating system supported by Firefox and displays the hosting location, country, longevity, popularity, and an abstracted risk rating for each site visited.

Additionally, the toolbar blocks access to phishing sites reported by other members of the Netcraft Toolbar community and validated by Netcraft, mobilizing the community into a giant neighborhood watch scheme which empowers the most alert and experienced members to protect the vulnerable against fraud and phishing attacks. Well over 7,000 phishing sites have been detected and blocked by people using the Netcraft Toolbar since the system started at the turn of the year.

It is available to download from the Toolbar website, and requires no special administrator privileges to install.

Customized versions with corporate branding and navigation are also available.