Ike.ninja

In the October 2014 survey we received responses from 1,028,932,208 sites,
which is nearly six million more than last month.

Apache regains the lead

Microsoft lost the lead to Apache this month, as the two giants continue to battle closely for the largest
share of all websites. Apache gained nearly 30 million sites, while Microsoft lost 22 million, causing Apache to be thrust back into
the lead by more than 36 million sites. In total, 385 million sites are now powered by Apache, giving it a
37.45% share of the market.

A significant contributor to this change was the expiry of domains previously used for link farming on Microsoft IIS servers. The domains used by these link farms were acquired and the sites are now hosted on Apache servers at Confluence-Networks, which display Network Solutions parking notices.

A new major release in the Apache 2.2 legacy branch was announced on 3 September. Apache 2.2.29
also incorporates many changes — including several security fixes — from version
2.2.28, which was not officially released.
New versions of nginx stable and
mainline were also released during September,
which included fixes for an SSL session reuse vulnerability, plus several other bugfixes.

Top million sites

The million busiest websites now represent less than 0.1% of all websites in the survey, but provide an insight into the preferences amongst the sites which are responsible for the great majority of today’s web traffic.

Just over half (50.2%) of the top million sites use Apache, which is very similar to its
share amongst all active sites; however, nginx’s market share is skewed noticeably higher amongst the top million
sites, where it powers 20.3% of sites, compared with only 14.3% of all active sites.

Computer growth

The most stable metric is the market share of web-facing computers — hundreds of thousands of websites can easily be served from a single computer (and subsequently disappear all in one go) but it is obviously far less trivial and less desirable to deploy or decommission a significant number of computers. Netcraft’s survey is also able to identify distinct computers which use multiple web-facing IP addresses, which adds further stability.

Apache leads in this market with a 47.5% share, and Microsoft also performs well with 30.7%, but both have been gradually falling over the past few years as a result of nginx’s strong growth. nginx gained more than 17,000 additional web-facing computers this month, helping to bring its market share up to 10.3%.

New top level domains

The relatively new .xyz domain, which showed tremendous growth over the past couple of months, has started to flatten out slightly after gaining only 33,000 sites this month (+8%). Nonetheless, this is still quite a healthy gain, albeit notably less than last month’s growth of 177,000 hostnames which then boosted its total by 78%.

Other promising TLDs include .london, .hamburg and .公司,
each of which had fewer than 50 sites in last month’s survey, but now have 17,000, 11,000 and 10,000
sites respectively.

The internationalised .公司 (.xn--55qx5d) TLD is delegated to the Computer Network Information Center of Chinese
Academy of Sciences. It means “company”, making it the Chinese equivalent of .com.

For more information see Active Sites

Qube had the most reliable company site in September with only a single failed request. This is the fourth time this year that Qube has made it to first place, nudging ahead of Datapipe’s track record this year. Qube offers a Hybrid cloud service, where physical servers and equipment are integrated with its cloud hosting with a secure connection between the two networks.

The second most reliable hosting company site belonged to GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, and had only 3 failed requests in September. Memset and dinahosting also had only 3 failed requests and thus they were ranked by average connection times.

In third place is Memset. Memset was last ranked in the top 10 in June 2013 when it achieved 9th place with 6 failed requests. Memset offers its customers a Perimeter Patrol service, which involves regular scanning of Memset servers to highlight security vulnerabilities.

Linux was still the most popular operating system of choice, used by 6 of the top 10, followed by FreeBSD which was used by 3. EveryCity, however, uses SmartOS, a community fork of OpenSolaris geared towards cloud hosting using KVM virtualisation.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers’ sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer’s point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. In the event the number of failed requests are equal then sites are ranked by average connection times.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.