Jan 14, 2011 12:05 GMT  ·  By

The final month of 2010 proved a fruitful one for the creation of new websites, with close to 20 million hostnames created in just the last month. While Apache remains the favorite web server, with a large slice of the market, nginx saw a significant boost in the last month, according to data from Netcraft.

"nginx once again saw the largest increase in market share amongst the top web servers, gaining 0.88 percentage points or 3.59M hostnames. nginx now controls 7.50% of hostnames in the survey, though only 6.12% within the top 1 million sites," Netcraft writes.

"nginx's growth in active sites is more modest, adding 429k active sites, leaving nginx with a 8.23% share," it added.

"Lighttpd was the only other web server to increase its share of hostnames this month, increasing by 558k hostnames," it continued.

In total, there were 273,301,445 sites at the start of January 2011. That's up from 255,287,546 sites in December 2010, more than 18 million new hostnames have been created. That's after a total of 50 million were created in 2010.

Apache is holding steady, despite a small decline, with about 59.13 percent of the market and no real competitor in sight. 10.1 million websites hosted with Apache were added in the past month, 9.9 million of which in the US and Germany alone.

Microsoft IIS comes in a distant number two with 21.00 percent of the market, a 1.22 percent points drop from the previous month. Still, it managed to add 669,000 hostnames in that time.

When it comes to active servers, things look a little different. Apache still dominates, but with a smaller market share of 57.57 percent. Microsoft's IIS fares even worse with 16.76 percent of the market.

Google's own web server though, primarily used by Blogger, has 11.90 percent of the market, more than double the 5.53 percent it has of the total number of hostnames.