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In the December 2013 survey we received responses from 861,023,217 sites, an increase of 75.7M since last month.

For the third consecutive month Microsoft experienced the largest growth in web server market share; an additional 51M sites boosted its market share by almost 4 percentage points. Apache had the biggest loss in market share, despite seeing an increase of 7M sites. Nginx’s growth this month has led to them regaining some of the market share lost last month, and results in a net gain of 3M sites over the last two months (a loss of 13M in November, followed by a gain this month of 16M).

Considering only active sites, Microsoft’s growth was significantly lower (compared to its gain of 51M sites) with an increase of 478k active sites. Apache saw the largest increase of 622k active sites, and increased its market share by 2 percentage points to 54%. Google meanwhile saw a large loss of 8.6M active sites within its App Engine service.

Microsoft’s web server market share could see further gains from its own Windows Azure cloud service — Microsoft has made Azure more cost-effective with price reductions and a new enterprise plan. Microsoft also has plans to expand Azure into Brazil in 2014. Unsurprisingly Microsoft IIS is the most common Web Server seen on Azure, used by 87% of sites. Amazon followed Microsoft’s price cuts by introducing price reductions on EC2 M3 Instances. At Amazon, 36% of sites are running on nginx, followed by Apache with 27% and Microsoft IIS with 14%.

ICANN has begun delegating new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) from its new gTLD expansion program, adding them into the Internet’s Root Zone.
The first four gTLDs
(شبكة, онлайн, сайт, 游戏)
were delegated on October 23rd and a further 30 new gTLDs have been delegated throughout November.
ICANN has a mandatory 30-day sunrise period following delegation where registries “complete a final process built into the new gTLD Program to protect trademark rights holders“; after this has passed the new gTLD can be made available to the general public at the registry’s discretion. The شبكة dotShabaka registry was first to start its sunrise period on 31 October, this is to be followed by an (optional) Landrush Period before general availability commences on February 4th. So far the only sites found by Netcraft have been for the NICs (Network Information Center) themselves, such as: nic.游戏, nic.сайт, nic.онлайн, nic.شبكة.

The first gTLDs signed agreements back in July and more are being agreed each month. Recent notable gTLDs that have been agreed include the cities .london,
.berlin,
.budapest,
.wein (Vienna) and .tokyo.

For more information see Active Sites