Hosting News

The number of websites running on the Apache web server has shown a significant gain over the last month, according to the latest data from Netcraft.

The monthly survey looks at web server software usage on internet-connected computers and collects and collates as many hostnames as can be found providing an HTTP service. Each is systematically polled with an HTTP request for the server name. The November survey received responses from 44,946,965 sites.

Netcraft said the percentage of web sites running Apache grew to 67.41 percent, an increase of 2.8 percent from the last survey, while Microsoft's IIS saw its share fall to 21.02, a drop of 2.44 percent.

This was mainly because register.com, a leading domain registrar with a domain parking system serving over a million domains, got rid of its Windows front end, and reverted to Linux and Apache which it had been running earlier.

"Barely weeks ago its largest rival, Network Solutions made a similar switch from Microsoft-IIS back to SunOne, nee Netscape-Enterprise, for its own domain parking system," Netcraft said.

The November survey also provided analysis on switching of hosting providers - it compares the hosting location of each site found by the survey as indicated by the DNS with the equivalent information for the same site in the previous month.

The data showed US and German companies had made the biggest gains over the last month, with the top 10 companies evenly spread between Europe and the US.