In the January 2006 survey we received responses from 75,251,256 sites, an increase of 897K sites from December 2005. With the gain, the Internet resumes its pattern of steady growth, which was interrupted last month with a decrease of 219K hostnames, which was the first decline in the survey nearly three years. The loss was the result of the expiration of 1 million .name domains at Zipa.

This month's analysis shows how changes at a single large provider can influence survey trends. The market share for the Apache web server is down by nearly three percent this month, due primarily to configuration changes at domain registrar Go Daddy. Its bulk hosting service includes a front-end system that generates an HTTP redirect when a site is first accessed — and this redirect is not served by (or, at least, does not identify itself as) Apache. Once the redirect is followed, or if the site is accessed a second time, it is then served by Apache. So this change (which, given the large number of sites hosted by Go Daddy, has not gone unnoticed), has caused a large swing from Apache to Unknown.

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.