In the December 2008 survey, we received responses from 186,727,854 sites. This total has grown by 1.56 million sites since last month.

Apache shows the largest growth this month, gaining a further 2.47 million sites. Just over half of this growth is due to the net hostname growth at ThePlanet.com, which once again includes a large number of .pl domains. Many of these new sites redirect to another site hosted by ThePlanet.com, which appears to offer PornTube videos, but in fact directs visitors towards a site which Google believes to be malware .

Yahoo! Traffic Server shows another large gain since it was uncloaked at Yahoo! last month. This month's survey now finds 1.68 million sites running on YTS, which is used exclusively by Yahoo! as a reverse proxy and connection management server for a number of its services.

nginx shows the 3rd largest growth this month, climbing by more than 10% to reach 3.35 million sites. This server now has nearly 1.8% of the worldwide market share — an impressive feat, given that it is the work of just one man, Igor Sysoev.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - December 2008

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - December 2008

Top Developers

Developer	Nov-08	Share	Dec-08	Share	Change
Apache	93,207,591	50.34%	95,678,052	51.24%	0.90
Microsoft	63,871,279	34.49%	63,126,940	33.81%	-0.69
Google	10,996,941	5.94%	10,455,103	5.60%	-0.34
nginx	3,023,369	1.63%	3,354,329	1.80%	0.16
lighttpd	3,030,958	1.64%	3,046,333	1.63%	-0.01

The November 2008 survey shows worldwide monthly growth of nearly three million websites, with responses now being received from a total of 185,167,897 sites.

Apache once again tops this month's growth, gaining 1.3 million sites to 93 million, but Microsoft-IIS follows closely gaining 1.1 million extra sites to reach 64 million. Google has grown by 509 thousand this month to approach the 11 million mark.

One interesting change this month is the appearance of 221,000 sites hosted by Yahoo! that now identify themselves as running on the Yahoo! Traffic Server proxy. Last month's survey found only 521 sites that claimed to be running on YTS.

Yahoo! is thought to use YTS to provide reverse proxy and connection management in a number of its services, although many of the company's sites were previously configured to omit the Server header in their HTTP responses. Yahoo! sites thought to use YTS include Bix, delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Groups.

Yahoo! Traffic Server is used to serve 12 billion requests per day. It was originally developed by Inktomi Corporation as a proxy cache for web traffic and streaming media. Websense acquired the technology behind Inktomi's proxy server, modifying it for use in their WebBlazer Web Threat Management System. Inktomi was then acquired by Yahoo! in 2002.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - November 2008

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - November 2008

Top Developers

Developer	October 2008	Percent	November 2008	Percent	Change
Apache	91,888,508	50.43%	93,207,591	50.34%	-0.09
Microsoft	62,766,928	34.44%	63,871,279	34.49%	0.05
Google	10,487,607	5.76%	10,996,941	5.94%	0.18
lighttpd	3,072,457	1.69%	3,030,958	1.64%	-0.05

In the October 2008 survey we received responses from 182,226,259 sites, which reflects growth of 948 thousand since last month.

Apache once again shows the largest growth, gaining 463 thousand sites this month. ThePlanet.com gains 1.3 million sites this month — nearly all of which are running on Apache — but this includes a large number of 'link farm' sites that use .pl domains to propagate search terms using pornographic phrases.

Google shows the next largest growth and boosts its total by 411 thousand sites. Google now runs 10.5 million sites on its own webserver software, which is used to host its own services in addition to user-generated applications and blogs. Some server names include:

• GFE/1.3, which is used by Google's Blogger service to publish third party blogs under the blogspot.com domain, and spreadsheets and other documents under docs.google.com.
• GWS-GRFE/0.50, which runs Google Groups.
• gws. This simple, lowercase name is used by Google's main search site at google.com and Google Image Search.
• Google Frontend, which is used to run third party applications on Google App Engine (often using the appspot.com domain) and Google Mashups.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - October 2008

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - October 2008

Top Developers

Developer	September 2008	Percent	October 2008	Percent	Change
Apache	91,425,295	50.43%	91,888,508	50.43%	-0.01
Microsoft	62,374,823	34.41%	62,766,928	34.44%	0.04
Google	10,076,405	5.56%	10,487,607	5.76%	0.20
lighttpd	3,095,928	1.71%	3,072,457	1.69%	-0.02

In the September 2008 survey we received responses from 181,277,835 sites. Of the 4.5 million sites that have been gained this month, more than three-quarters are using Apache.

Many of the new Apache sites are hosted at ThePlanet.com, which alone saw growth of 2.6 million sites. As has been the trend for the past few months, hundreds of thousands of the new sites at ThePlanet.com are link farms hosted on Polish (.pl) domain names and contain little more than pornographic text links to other sites within the same domain.

Further down the field, Resin grows significantly this month and is now found powering 343 thousand sites, making Resin the 12th most popular web server in the world. Resin is an application server product from Caucho Technology, which produces high performance open source Java and PHP solutions. Most of the new Resin-powered sites appeared at Panther IT Services, hosted in the Netherlands using .tk domains (Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand). Many of these sites use framesets to display TiKinet text link adverts at the top of the site's content.

SmugMug now contributes more than 18 thousand Apache sites to the Netcraft survey. These sites have the form nickname.smugmug.com and are used by SmugMug customers to display and sell their photographs via SmugMug's secure checkout.

SmugMug demonstrates an interesting mix of technologies, with the sites being hosted using the F5 BIG-IP device, and with more than half a petabyte of data being stored using Amazon S3. SmugMug also makes use of Amazon EC2 to process its customers' high resolution photos and videos. SmugMug has a partnership with Go Daddy to let power users register custom domain names which can be used to point to their galleries.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - September 2008

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - September 2008

Top Developers

Developer	August 2008	Percent	September 2008	Percent	Change
Apache	88,047,801	49.82%	91,425,295	50.43%	0.62
Microsoft	61,646,837	34.88%	62,374,823	34.41%	-0.47
Google	10,502,299	5.94%	10,076,405	5.56%	-0.38
lighttpd	2,914,867	1.65%	3,095,928	1.71%	0.06

In the August 2008 survey we received responses from 176,748,506 sites. This month's overall growth of 1.3 million sites reflects a loss of 760 thousand sites using Microsoft IIS, alongside Apache's growth of 1.2 million and Google's gain of half a million sites.

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