In the November 2005 survey we received responses from 74,572,794 sites, an increase of 181K hostnames from the October survey. This was the smallest increase in sites since January 2004 and was attributable to a decrease of 810K hostnames at the domain registrar enom, nearly all of which were parked .info domains that expired without being renewed.

The drop marks the first fallout from a move by Afilias (the operator of .info) to offer its names to registrars at no cost. In September 2004, an enom affiliate registered 1 million .info domains in a week, and offered them to customers owning similar names in .com. As the renewal date arrived last month, enom allowed the unclaimed domains to expire. Hostway, which offered free .info domains to customers last fall, had a decline of 215K sites last month, including 175K expiring domains.

The .info expirations impacted web server market share, since the expiring domains at enom were hosted on Windows Server 2003. That creates a 0.5% shift in market share in Apache's favor in hostnames. Among active sites, the trend is reversed, as Windows gains 0.85% while Apache has gains 0.12%.

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.