In the July 2004 survey we received responses from 52,131,889 sites, continuing the recent growth trend with a gain of just under half a million sites from June.

The open source Apache server has gained more than 4 million hostnames in the first half of 2004, compared to slightly more than 1.5 million hostnames for Microsoft server products. That split has closely tracked existing trends, leaving market share virtually unchanged so far this year.

The months ahead may test that stability, given recent security problems with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). Numerous sites running IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 were compromised and used to install password-stealing trojans on the machines of Internet users visiting those sites. Microsoft insists only unpatched servers were breached, but the initial version of the key Win2K patch was buggy. It remains to be seen whether having infected their own customers with malware will prompt the affected Microsoft-IIS 5.0 sites to switch platforms. Previous Microsoft-IIS worms have had suprisingly little impact on market share, although Code Red prompted a general tightening of router and firewall rulesets restricting access to web sites of all denominations, not just Microsoft-IIS.

Sun is the sum of sites running SunONE, iPlanet-Enterprise, Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce & Netsite-Communications.

Microsoft is the sum of sites running Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS.

Platform groupings are here.