14 DAY TRIAL // There's been a big increase in the number of web servers discovered live at the start of August 2011, more than 100 million new hostnames were found. However, the overall market share of the popular web servers changed slightly.
In the latest survey by Netcraft, 463,000,317 sites were found. That's compared to 357,292,065 sites the month before.
The big discrepancy is not a sign of a huge increase in actual websites, rather the numbers grew because of an increase in responses at several companies, which can be accounted for in a number of ways.
"This month there has been a large increase in the number of sites found by the survey, which is now approaching half a billion hostnames," Netcraft reported.
"There were particularly large increases in the numbers of sites hosted by Softlayer, AmeriNOC, China Telecom, and the social networking communities Tumblr, Skyrock and Hyves," it added.
"However, even with the large increase in sites, the market share of the different server software has changed only a little," the report said.
"Of the leading web servers, just nginx gained share this month, whilst Apache, Microsoft and Google each showed small losses," it added.
Each web server grew according to its existing market share, so Apache is still on top with about 65.18 percent of the market, only a 0.69 percent points decrease from the previous month.
The same can be said for Microsoft IIS servers, which represented 15.86 percent of the market in August, a 0.96 percent points drop from July.
Nginx on the other hand, grew by 1.14 percent points, to 7.67 percent of the web server market, a huge increase when considering its rather small share.
Finally, of the top web servers, Google also saw quite a dramatic 0.69 percent points drop, from 4.38 percent to just 3.68 percent at the start of August.