Internet research and security firm Netcraft has released the findings of its June 2008 Web Server Survey. Netcraft pegged the number of websites at a shade over 172 million, an increase of 3.9 million from the preceding month. The main objective of this survey wasn’t to perform a headcount of websites but to size up web server usage trends.

Apache is the most popular web server of the lot with nearly 50% market share across all domains, though its use is waning a bit. Microsoft’s IIS web server has been gaining at the expense of Apache since 2005 and the trend remains the same with IIS adding another 2 million websites, an increase of .036% market share. It remains at the second spot followed by Sun, lighttpd, Google and Ncsa.

Bahamas has emerged as a hot offshore hosting destination with Secure Hosting Limited, a Bahamas-based offshore hosting firm, adding 1.2 million websites from Nameview Inc.

The number of websites has shot up nearly 25 times in the last 8 years and this massive increase can be imputed in large parts to the advent of blogging. This figure should only be taken as a rough estimate as there might be a lot more websites than what Netcraft’s data suggests.

Furthermore, Netcraft’s findings tend to be at odds with that of the Internet Systems Consortium, which estimated the number of websites to be over 500 million in January, 2008 itself. The huge disparity in their figures is rooted in the methodological difference between the two research groups.

Image Credit: Validweb

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Software, Internet, Research, survey, web server, apache, websites, microsoft iis, web hosting

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