In the October 2005 survey we received responses from 74,409,971 sites, an increase of 2.68 million sites from the September survey. The large gain makes 2005 the strongest year ever for Internet growth, as the web has added 17.5 million sites, easily surpassing the previous annual mark of 16 million during the height of the dot-com boom in 2000.

This month also saw movement in web server market share for the first time in many months, with Windows servers gaining 0.75 percent market share in active sites, while Apache's share fell by 0.67 percent. Apache continues to maintain a large lead in both active sites and hostnames, and in fact improved its share by 0.74 percent in hostnames. With this month's growth, Apache now powers more than 50 million sites.