Ike.ninja

In the October 2012 survey we received responses from 620,480,777 sites, an increase of 350K sites since last month’s survey.

In spite of this, all major web server vendors lost hostnames this month with the exception of Microsoft – gaining around 3.5M – with a 0.58% rise in market share. This continues Apache’s decline in market share, with a drop of 0.49 percentage points from last month.

In terms of active sites, all of the major vendors made losses. In terms of market share, both Microsoft and Apache made small gains, 0.5 percentage points for Apache compared with 0.1% for Microsoft.

In the top million busiest sites, nginx made modest gains in market share. Microsoft, Apache and Google all lost sites. This continues the downward trend on from last month for both Apache and Google, with Apache falling further back from the 60% threshold that it hit in August.

Although Apache dominates the overall market, where it is used by 58% of all websites, the secure server market paints a very different picture. Netcraft’s SSL Survey found 2.3 million distinct, valid third-party certificates being used by HTTPS websites in October. Apache and Microsoft are almost neck and neck with 41.6% and 40.8% of the secure market share respectively, with the latter being noticeably higher than Microsoft’s 15.7% share amongst HTTP sites.

Usage of nginx is also significantly different between the HTTPS and HTTP markets: although it is used by 11.9% of all sites in the Web Server Survey, it is used to serve only 2.3% of SSL certificates.

This month 516k hostnames moved from FC2 to Amazon, contributing to a net gain of 342k. FC2 is a provider of free ad-supported blogs and other web-based blogging tools. However, as many of these blogs are inactive, this change did not lead to an overall increase in the number of active sites hosted by Amazon.

Nasdaq has announced that it plans to make use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power its new financial data management system, which retains data required for financial regulation. This can be seen as a sign that large organisations are becoming more willing to make use of third party cloud offerings to host their data systems, and that the benefits associated with cloud-based solutions (low cost and high scalability) are increasingly outweighing the risks (security and accountability concerns). This follows Amazon becoming the largest hosting location last month. The quantity of web-facing computers owned by Amazon increased a further 5% this month.

For more information see Active Sites