In the July 2012 survey we received responses from 665,916,461 sites, a decrease of 31M since last month.

This drop comes as a result of the loss of a large number of wildcard hostnames with similar content at AmeriNOC (-30M), Axoft Group (-10M), and Tailor Made Servers (-8M). All of these sites were running Apache, resulting in a decrease of 39M hostnames running on Apache and dropping its market share slightly to 61%. All other web server vendors gained hostnames this month, with the biggest increase being 1.5M hostnames running on Microsoft IIS. This was followed by nginx and lighttpd with increases of 950k and 800k hostnames respectively.

Within Netcraft’s million busiest websites, nginx experienced a jump in market share this month to 12.5% after an increase of 22k sites. Nginx also saw the biggest switch of hostnames, with about.com changing around 600 top-million hostnames from Apache, the most popular of these being pcsupport.about.com. Nginx now stands nearly 1 percentage point of market share behind Microsoft. Apache and Microsoft both saw losses within the top million, of 32k and 10k respectively.

In the June 2012 survey we received responses from 697,089,482 sites, a growth of 5.1% or 34M sites since last month.

All major web server vendors experienced an increase in hostnames this month. After a loss of 17.5M hostnames last month Apache saw the largest growth this month with an increase of 22.8M hostnames. The second largest growth was seen by Microsoft with an increase of 3.5M hostnames. This, however, still resulted in a loss in the market share for Microsoft. nginx, after nine consecutive months of market share growth, also experienced a loss in market share albeit gaining 2.1M hostnames.

The 6th of June 2012 is the World IPv6 launch day. The event is organized by the Internet Society and it is aiming to promote the widespread usage of the protocol. This month's survey received IPv6 AAAA results for over 7M hostnames, mapping to 105k distinct IPv6 addresses. Apache was found running on the majority of these hostnames (6.2M), followed by nginx with 398k hostnames.

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.

In the April 2012 survey we received responses from 676,919,707 sites, giving a rise of 32.6M hostnames (5.1%) since last month.

Apache saw the largest growth (22.8M) and increased its market share to 65.5%. nginx, with the second largest growth (4.5M), increased its total to 69.9M. Microsoft had a greater increase in hostnames this month (+3.5M) compared to March, however still experienced a small loss in market share.

Microsoft's new server operating system, codenamed Windows Server 8, which was released to MSDN subscribers in September 2011 has now been made available as a public beta. Microsoft-IIS/8.0 is the default web server on Windows Server 8, and the April 2012 survey found 278 sites with this server header. However, many of these sites are running on Linux, indicating proxy servers or forged server headers. The first sites deploying Windows Server 8 include iis.net, phponwindows.net, and a Microsoft corporate remote access service. Indicative of an early beta, many installations are on isolated broadband connections, rather than at large hosting providers.

In the March 2012 survey we received responses from 644,275,754 sites, giving a rise of 31.4M hostnames (5.1%) since last month.

Apache continued to gain hostnames this month with a growth of 22.5M and, contrary to last month, was able to increase its market share by a third of a percentage point. nginx had another good month and experienced an increase of 4.7M hostnames or 7.82%. With all other major web server vendors showing higher growth than Microsoft's 761k increase, Microsoft recorded a drop in market share of half a percentage point. The gap between Microsoft and nginx now stands at 23.6M hostnames.

Amongst the Million Busiest Sites, Apache again suffered a small drop in market share this month, losing 1,700 sites, extending a trend that dates back to August 2011. Microsoft gained 110 sites making this the first time it has recorded an increase since June 2010. nginx continued to increase its market share and gained 1.2k sites, whilst Google suffered a small loss of 289 sites.

In the February 2012 survey we received responses from 612,843,429 sites. Compared to January, this represents an increase of 30M hostnames or +5.2%.

nginx was the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month, gaining 0.27 percentage points. Apache did experience a growth of 19M hostnames, but its market share has remained static, while Microsoft and Google had a small drop in market share despite gaining 3.9M and 450K hostnames respectively.

Within the Million Busiest Sites nginx continued its steady growth; gaining just over 12K new sites. Apache saw the biggest loss this month with a drop of 18K hostnames.

The Resin application server has been experiencing strong growth over the past 12 months; seeing an almost tenfold growth from 480k hostnames in February 2011 to 4.7M or 0.77% of the market in February 2012. Resin is a Java application server from Caucho which is used on a number of the Million Busiest Sites, including Bebo — now recovered from its outage last week.