Ike.ninja

In the July 2014 survey we received responses from 996,106,380 sites.

Microsoft gained 22 million sites this month, helping to increase its market
share by 1.18 percentage points. Combined with a 1.78 point loss in Apache’s market
share, Microsoft is now the new market leader with a 37.5%
share of all sites.

In the early days of the web, hostnames were a good indication of actively managed content providing information and services to the Internet community. Today, hostnames are used for a wide range of activities, including holding pages produced at the point of customer acquisition by domain registration or hosting service companies, typo-squatting advertising providers, speculative domain registrants, and search-engine optimisation companies. Where wildcard DNS is used, the vast majority of the hostnames will not receive visitors, and the resources required to run the sites are minimal.

Our active sites metric shows just how significant an influence automatically generated sites can have on the number of hostnames found by the survey for all server vendors. Apache remains the clear leader by number of active sites, and has been ever since we started using this additional metric in 2000. Over half of the world’s active sites use Apache; a total of more than 91 million active sites, compared with Microsoft’s 21 million.

Microsoft’s most recent growth in hostnames since mid-2013 has, for the most part, been caused by a large number of Chinese linkfarms (泛站群). The sites in question provide advertising for gambling sites, online product listings, and normally make use of affiliate schemes. Yet they are hosted in the USA, on generic TLDs such as .com and .net to bypass China’s TLD and internet content provider (ICP) license requirements. Unusually, each linkfarm makes use of a reasonably large number of domains and IP addresses, presumably making them harder for search engines to evade. This would normally be cost prohibitive for this kind of activity, however hosting and domain packages can be found advertised on auction sites specifically for this purpose, with packages of (random/unspecified) .com domains available for as little as ¥17 (~ £2 / $3) each, guaranteed to remain yours for at least a month. It is not clear why IIS has been chosen for these sites, however it does have a considerably higher market share (for all of our metrics) in China compared to worldwide – for example 59% of domains hosted in China use IIS compared to just 29% worldwide.

In just over a year IIS has gained over 236 million hostnames (+172%) while only gaining 503k active sites (+2%). The number of web-facing computers running IIS websites has increased by just over 30k (+2%), compared to Apache’s 171k growth (+8%), and nginx’s 159k growth (+53%), resulting in a 2.4 percentage point loss in market share for IIS by this metric.

For more information see Active Sites