Ike.ninja

In the May 2012 survey we received responses from 662,959,946 sites, a decrease of 14M hostnames compared to last month, and the first drop we have observed in 22 months. The drop comes as a result of a loss of over 28M hostnames under the .info tld, hosted by Softlayer, on just 100 domains and 4 IP addresses. Despite this, we still observed an increase of 1.2M new domains.

nginx saw its 9th consecutive month of increased market share, gaining 894k hostnames and increasing its share to 5.48%, more than double the value it held a year ago. Apache fared the worst this month, losing 17.5M hostnames. However, it remains far ahead of the competition with two out of every three hostnames being served using Apache. We detected 654 hostnames using Microsoft-IIS/8.0 this month, the default web server in Microsoft’s new Windows Server 2012, previously codenamed Windows Server 8.

Tracking of web servers using SPDY, an experimental network protocol intended to decrease web page loading times, has been added to the survey. We found a total of 339 SSL certificates used with SPDY-enabled servers. Usage outside of Google’s properties is limited, though a few sites such as humblebundle.com and webtide.com support it. To operate, SPDY must be supported by both the web server and the user’s browser. Of the major browsers, only Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have SPDY support. Apache, Jetty and Google’s server software are currently the only servers that support SPDY, though nginx support is scheduled for the end of May 2012.

For more information see Active Sites