In the April 2014 survey we received responses from 958,919,789 sites — 39 million more than last month.

Microsoft made the largest gain this month, with nearly 31 million additional sites boosting its market share by 1.9 percentage points. IIS is now used by a third of the world's websites. Although this is not Microsoft's largest ever market share (it reached 37% in October 2007), this is the closest it has ever been to Apache's leading market share, leaving Apache only 4.7 points ahead. Although Apache gained 6.9 million sites, this was not enough to prevent its market share falling by 0.87 to 37.7%. nginx, which gained 3.1 million sites, also lost some of its market share.

More than 70% of this month's new IIS-powered websites are hosted in the US, followed by 22% in China. Nearly 20 million of the new IIS sites in the US are hosted by a single company, Nobis Technology Group, which was also responsible for much of Microsoft's growth in February. A smaller amount of Microsoft IIS growth was also seen on the Windows Azure platform (which will be renamed to Microsoft Azure on April 3), where the total number of active sites has grown by 25% since February, when we compared the platform against Amazon AWS. 84% of all active sites hosted on the Azure platform are running Microsoft web server software.

Many of the new IIS sites hosted by Nobis Technology Group feature similar content and form part of a Chinese link farm. Link farming is often an attempt to influence search engine results, and each individual site within a link farm is typically of little interest to a human. Netcraft's active sites metric therefore provides a better idea of how many websites are actively managed rather than being automatically generated en mass, such as link farm content and domain holding pages. Of the 114 million sites hosted by Nobis, only a fifth are counted as active sites.

In terms of active sites, Apache remains in a much stronger position with a 52% share of the market, compared with Microsoft's 11%. A significantly higher proportion of Apache sites are active: 26% of all Apache sites were deemed to be active, whereas only 6% of Microsoft's were. nginx takes a 14% share of the active sites market, putting it 3 points ahead of Microsoft.

Apache also fares well amongst the million busiest sites, where there is intrinsically very little interference from domain holding pages, link farms and other web spam. Here Apache takes a 53% share of the market, while nginx has 18% and Microsoft has 12%. Although only 3% of the top million sites use Google web server software, Google's dominance amongst the very busiest sites give it a presence on 8 of the top 10 sites.

Both Apache and nginx were affected by security vulnerabilities which were resolved during March, whereas Microsoft IIS has yet to be affected by publicly-known security issues this year.

The latest version of Apache (2.4.9) was released on March 17. The Apache Software Foundation describes this as representing fifteen years of innovation by the project, and this major release of the 2.4 stable branch is recommended over all previous releases. Nevertheless, it is still common for many websites to use the legacy 2.2 branch of releases, or even older versions. Apache 2.4.9 is primarily a security and bug fix release, although it also includes the changes introduced in 2.4.8, which was not actually released. A workaround for a bug in older versions of OpenSSL, which prevented the release of 2.4.8, has been included in 2.4.9.

Although Apache 2.4.8 was not released, the development version (Apache/2.4.8-dev) was found on 675 sites during this survey, which ran in March. Nearly all of these sites were running on FreeBSD servers which belonged to various Apache projects, mostly Apache HTTPD and Apache OpenOffice.

The stable branch of nginx was updated twice during March. Two bugs were resolved in nginx 1.4.6, which was released on March 4. nginx 1.4.7 was then released on March 18, addressing another bug and a heap buffer overflow vulnerability. This security vulnerability affected nginx's SPDY module, where a specially crafted request could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable web server. nginx is notable for its SPDY support, which is used extensively by CloudFlare and also by Automattic, which hosts millions of WordPress blogs and co-sponsored the development of the ngx_http_spdy_module. The same SPDY vulnerability also affected the mainline branch of nginx, which was resolved with the release of nginx 1.5.12.

Many of the new generic top level domains (gTLDs) are starting to appear in Netcraft's Web Server Survey in significant numbers. For example, the previous survey saw only one website using the .guru gTLD, whereas this month's survey (which ran during March) found 36 thousand. Other gTLDs which have shown significant growth since last month's survey include .photography, .today, .tips, .technology, .directory, .land, .gallery, .estate and .singles.

Amongst established TLDs, the number of sites using the .ga country code top level domain grew by 140% this month. The My GA website allows .ga domains to be registered for free from between 1 and 12 months, which has no doubt helped towards their goal of increasing the awareness of Gabon across the globe. The .ga ccTLD is administered by the Agence Nationale des Infrastructures Numériques et des Fréquences (ANINF) in Libreville, Gabon, while the registration process is provided by Freenom, who also provide free domain registrations for the more popular .tk ccTLD. Registered Freenom users are allowed an unlimited number of domain name renewals on both the .ga and .tk d domains, while paying customers can choose to register domains for as long as 10 years in one go and can automatically renew the registration.

Free and easily-registerable domain names are obviously attractive to fraudsters: During February, Netcraft blocked nearly 1,500 unique phishing sites hosted on .ga domains alone, and this figure jumped to more than 2,400 in March. The vast majority of these phishing attacks targeted Chinese companies, particularly the Taobao marketplace and the Alipay online payment escrow service.

For more information see Active Sites