In the October 2009 survey, we received responses from 230,443,449 sites. Apache is responsible for more than 60% of this month's total growth of 4.3 million sites.

Apache gained 2.6 million sites in total, including 748 thousand new Apache sites at German hosting company Hetzner Online. Many of Hetzner's new sites are using the dyns.cx dynamic DNS service, which allows customers to use hostnames such as yourname.dyns.cx to point to IP addresses at Hetzner.

Despite Apache's overall growth, it suffered a loss of 646 thousand sites in the United States. This loss is largely attributable to The Planet, where 1.4 million expired hostnames resulted in a net loss of 706 thousand sites.

nginx showed significant growth again this month, with 1.1 million additional sites bringing its total up to 13.8 million. This web server software is particularly predominant at China Telecom, where it is used by more than 80% of their 7.9 million websites. China Telecom also showed the largest gain in nginx sites this month, contributing more than half a million sites to the worldwide gain of 1.1 million. 424 thousand of these new nginx sites belong to blogs at 163.com.