Ike.ninja

In the September 2014 survey we received responses from 1,022,954,603
sites — nearly 31 million more than last month.

More than a billion websites

This is the first time the survey has exceeded a billion websites,
a milestone achievement that was unimaginable two decades ago.

Netcraft’s first ever survey was carried out over 19 years ago in August 1995. That survey
found only 18,957 sites, although the first significant milestone of one million sites was reached
in less than two years, by April 1997.

Fuelled by the dot-com bubble between 1997 and 2000, the survey reached nearly 10 million sites
by the start of 2000. The active sites metric was added to our survey shortly afterwards, immediately showing that a significant proportion of websites were automatically generated, displaying identical tag structures, and used for activities such as holding pages, typo-squatting advertising providers, speculative domain registrants, and search-engine optimisation companies.

Rapid hostname growth has continued ever since, with the number of active sites increasing at a far gentler rate. Just under half of the hostnames in our June 2000 survey were active sites, whereas today, less than one in five are active — 178 million active sites in total.

Microsoft, Apache, and nginx

Microsoft and Apache currently take the lion’s share of the web server market (just over 71% combined), while Microsoft edged into the lead for the first time in July 2014. Nginx has been steadily gaining share over the last 7 years, and is now used to serve just over 14% of all hostnames.

The view by number of active sites is very different, however. While Microsoft has seen a rapid growth in their hostname market share of around 20 percentage points since September 2011, there has been almost no change in their share of the active sites in this time. Nginx overtook Microsoft in terms of active sites in 2012, and today has a market share of 14.5% – more than 2 points ahead of Microsoft, whose web server software is used by only 11.9% of active sites. However, Apache truly dominates this market, with more than half of all active sites choosing to use Apache software.

Recently nginx has been seeing even greater gains in terms of web facing computers, doubling their market share in the last 2 years to just over 10% this month. Apache and Microsoft are continuing to experience increases in their number of web facing computers, however the growth is often far smaller than that of nginx. This month they gained just 323 and 414 computers respectively, compared to an increase of over 17k for nginx.

New top level domains

Dozens of new TLDs were added to the Root Zone during this month’s survey, including
.deals, .healthcare, .realtor,
.auction, .yandex, .city
and .lgbt. Recent additions which have now started to experience growth in the survey include .media, .services, .reisen, .pictures, .exchange and .toys.
Each of these TLDs had only
two or three sites last month, but all are now in their thousands.

The .xyz domain, which we mentioned last month, has outpaced all of the other new gTLDs after a Network Solutions promotion offering a free matching .xyz domain with each .com domain purchased. This month an additional 177,000 hostnames were found under this TLD, bringing the total number of .xyz sites up by 78% to 403,000.
Even faster growth was seen among the .中国 (xn--fiqs8s) internationalised domain name for China, which grew by 181% to a total of 73,000 sites.

For more information see Active Sites