In the July 2013 survey we received responses from 698,823,509 sites, an increase of 25.8M.

Apache and nginx, both open source web servers, have lost market share this month whilst Microsoft gained significantly, up by 2.43 percentage points, to just shy of 20% of worldwide sites. For the second consecutive month, nginx is powering fewer sites than in the previous month's Web Server Survey, which is due, in part, to almost 2M sites moving from nginx and to Apache. Within the million busiest sites, a similar picture emerges: nginx lost over 4,000 busy sites, many of which have moved to Apache.

Windows Azure, Microsoft's own cloud platform, is, as expected, dominated by Microsoft IIS — more than 96% of all sites hosted on the platform are using IIS. Azure is not, however, limited to just the Windows operating system, Linux is also available. This month, Netcraft found 170,000 (13,000 more than last month) sites being served on 18,000 (+1,100) web-facing computers at Azure. Azure had net gains of sites from several of the best known hosting providers including Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and Go Daddy.

Sites (hostnames) switching to being hosted at Microsoft from notable providers, June 2013 to July 2013

Amidst continuing uncertainty over the scale of both PRISM and related surveillance programmes, some people have expressed concerns about hosting personal information in the United States. Currently, the United States is a Safe Harbour for European data, which allows American businesses to comply with European data protection legislation. With the European Commission seeking clarification from the US Government regarding the surveillance programme, and hosting companies selling guaranteed European hosting as a feature, the recent revelations might lead to international businesses moving away from US-based hosting providers.

Currently, almost one third of the world's sites are hosted in Europe but the United States has a near majority of 49.5% of all sites. Looking at the top 5 European TLDs by the number of sites (.de, .pl, .nl, .fr, and .uk) only 7% are hosted in the United States and the vast majority are hosted in their home country — for example, 90% of sites within the .de TLD are hosted in Germany — with the exception of the United Kingdom, which hosts 56% at home and almost 20% in the United States. Additionally, the use of open source software is significantly more prominent in Europe: more than 80% of European hosted sites use Apache or nginx and less than 5% use Microsoft IIS. The United States, on the other hand, has more than 25% of its sites running on Microsoft IIS while Apache and nginx have a slim majority of just 53%.

Last month, Netcraft wrote about the meteoric rise of DigitalOcean, a US-based cloud hosting provider. The service, which has been attracting users with competitive pricing and rapid deployment (within a minute), has seen strong growth again this month, the number of web-facing computers is up 31% since last month. Only 7% of the web-facing computers at DigitalOcean are based in their Dutch data centre, down (as a proportion) from 31% at the beginning of this year — perhaps caused by a shortage of available IP addresses.

Sites (hostnames) switching to being hosted at DigitalOcean from notable providers, June 2013 to July 2013

For more information see Active Sites