May 2010 Web Server Survey

In the May 2010 survey we received responses from 206,026,787 sites.

Four of the five major web servers gained hostnames since last month. Google lost for the second month in a row with a drop of 1.4M hostnames, predominantly caused by expired sites in its blogging system.

Although Microsoft served 780K more hostnames this month, it actually lost 235K active sites. As with Google, this was due to a significant loss of blogging sites.

The biggest change this month was a 1.9M increase in hostnames served using Apache. The largest contributor to this was a growth of 561K sites by Next Dimension Inc, but the majority of this consisted of parked sites on a single IP address.

Rackspace recently reported that cloud computing sales were predicted to hit £8.5 billion ($12.6 bn) by 2014. Netcraft has seen significant growth in this sector. The number of sites hosted on Amazon EC2 increased for the eighth month in a row. There were 365K Amazon cloud sites in this month's survey, a growth of 33% since December 2009.

One of the busiest sites hosted on Amazon EC2 as determined by visits from the Netcraft Toolbar is www.farmville.com. With over 75 million users, Farmville is a game available through Facebook in which players can grow crops and raise livestock.