In the February 2015 survey we received responses from 883,419,935 sites and 5,135,229 web-facing computers.

Microsoft showed the largest growth in terms of hostnames, with an additional 12 million sites taking its total up to 253 million. This has increased Microsoft's market share to 28.7%, but Apache continues to lead with a 38.8% share, despite a loss of 5.9 million sites.

Web-facing computer growth was fairly even across the board, with the top three server vendors all showing similar gains. nginx made the largest gain of just under 22,000 computers, while Microsoft and Apache each gained just over 20,000. This has resulted in nginx's market share growing slightly to 11.3%, but Apache maintains its comfortable lead with a 47.2% share, while Microsoft's stays at 29.9%.

Despite its impending lack of support, the number of hostnames using Microsoft IIS 6.0 grew by more than 5% this month; however, the number of web-facing computers using this platform fell by 2%. This version of IIS was released more than 10 years ago, alongside Windows Server 2003, both of which will reach the end of their Extended Support periods in July.

Several of the new generic top-level domains continue to show surprising growth. The number of sites using the .xyz TLD nearly doubled this month, and now totals more than 10 million. Strong growth was also seen by the .red TLD, which grew by nearly 3,000% to reach a total of 850,000. Other new colour-based gTLDs to have appeared in Netcraft's survey recently include .blue, .pink and .black; these are all run by Afilias, which also acts as the domain registry for other well-established TLDs such as .info, .mobi.

The .paris geographic TLD has shown a promising start by already reaching a total of 13,000 sites, outpacing growth seen by other new GeoTLDs which reached general availability around the same time. The .paris GeoTLD became available to all on 2 December 2014 and proclaims itself to be the most affordable address in Paris. The most visited .paris website is currently www.toureiffel.paris, which is where visitors will end up if they attempt to visit the Eiffel Tower's previous website at www.tour-eiffel.fr.

In January, Google added support for the Google Domains beta directly into Blogger, making it easier for users to purchase custom domain names for their blogs. Google has been an ICANN accredited domain registrar since 2005, allowing it to sell domain names under the most popular top-level domains such as .com, .net and .org, but it is also in the process of making a much larger range of new gTLDs available to the public under its role as a registry.

Google Registry is operated by Charleston Road Registry Inc, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. So far, it has launched three new TLDs: .みんな (which means "everyone" in Japanese), .soy (Spanish for "I am"), and most recently, .how. Google's other successful applications for gTLDs include .zip, .eat, .foo, .meme, and .new, but these are not yet available to register.

Google applied for more than 100 new gTLDs in total, costing it over $18M in ICANN application fees. Some of these applications were subsequently withdrawn, such as that for .and, which was not allowed as it corresponds to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code for Andorra. Many of the gTLDs that Google applied for also had other applicants competing for ownership, including Amazon in 21 cases.

Google and Amazon were the only applicants for the .dev gTLD, but Amazon withdrew its application after an assumed private deal or auction. Despite .dev being used by private domain names in some corporate development environments, the risk of name collisions was evidently deemed to be low enough to allow Google's application to succeed.

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