In the August 2010 survey we received responses from 213,458,815 sites.

This month saw four of the major web servers gaining hostnames but only two gaining market share.

Apache saw the largest increase again this month, gaining over 6.7M hostnames and pushing its share of the market above 56%, its highest share in 3 years. This large growth caused Microsoft to lose nearly 1 percentage point of market share despite gaining over 200k hostnames, mostly at China Telecom.

lighttpd has recovered from last month's losses, gaining 600k hostnames. After the massive drop of hostnames at SAVVIS in Australia, they have now partially recovered with the help of 200k new hostnames being served by lighttpd. Additionally iWeb Technologies Inc. have gained 300k hostnames pointing at lighttpd servers.

Google's share has dipped this month, losing 300k hostnames and a similar number of active sites.

In the July 2010 survey we received responses from 205,714,253 sites.

This month's results show that three of the six major web servers have gained hostnames in the last month, while the other three suffered losses.

The largest of these gains came from Apache, which saw an increase of over 1.1M hostnames.

Google's share has continued to increase, albeit at a slower rate than last month with just under 500k additional hostnames. This is due to increased activity on Blogger.

lighttpd suffered the largest overall loss this month, falling by 446k hostnames. This was caused by the loss of 690k hostnames at Savvis in Australia. Microsoft also experienced a loss this month, serving 648k fewer hostnames worldwide and also losing 265k active sites. A big contributor to this was a loss of 388k hostnames due to lower activity on Microsoft Live Spaces.

A backdoor has been discovered among a collection of security testing tools for Firefox.

The rogue Mozilla Sniffer add-on was included in the Web Application Security Penetration Testing collection. This set of tools is popular within the security community, as it simplifies the process of discovering vulnerabilities in web applications.

However, using the Mozilla Sniffer add-on would have introduced an unexpected vulnerability in any application being tested — whenever a login form was submitted, the add-on secretly sent a copy of the URL, password and other details to an IP address presumably controlled by the malicious author.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies' own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

In the June 2010 survey we received responses from 206,956,723 sites.

This month's numbers show a mixed picture with two of the five major web servers gaining hostnames in the last month and the other three recording losses.  A similar trend was recorded for active sites.

The largest increase in the number of hostnames served was for Google, which gained 3M due to increased activity at Blogger. The other web server to do better this month than last was Microsoft which served 1.8M more hostnames, 1.2M in the United States.  This was not the result of a single increase, but  significant growth at Microsoft Corp, GoDaddy Inc and VPLS Inc.

nginx was the largest overall loser of hostnames, serving 2.2M fewer than last month. 1.6M of this loss came in China as a result of drops at China Telecom, China Unicom and the Data Communications Bureau of Tianjin Province; the result of stale blogs at sohu.com, blogbus.com and hexun.com being expired from the survey.

Apache served 871k fewer hostnames worldwide and although not the largest overall loser, this figure actually masks much larger changes that occurred in individual countries.  The most significant took place in opposing directions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Apache served 2M more hostnames in the UK this month as a result of colossal growth at Real International Business Co, which saw an increase of more than 1.9M hostnames. However, all of the new hostnames attributed to them in the survey resolve to a single IP address. Meanwhile, in the US, Apache lost 3M hostnames at ThePlanet.com resulting in an overall loss of 2.5M in the country. The vast majority of these expired sites are due to Netcraft expiring stale accounts on the xorg.pl redirection service out of the survey.

As of 1st June 2010, the Netcraft Toolbar community has helped to block over 3 million phishing attacks worldwide. We incentivise phishing reports from the Toolbar community, and have now added the iPad to our list of incentives:

On reaching 5,000 validated reports you become eligible for a monthly competition to incentivise large reporters.

To report phishing sites to us, please use the form at http://toolbar.netcraft.com/report_url, or forward any phishing URLs or emails you receive to scam@netcraft.com.

The Netcraft Toolbar, which is available for Firefox, serves as a giant neighbourhood watch scheme for the Internet. Members who encounter a phishing fraud can act to defend the larger community of users against the attack. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the attack URL, it is blocked for toolbar users who subsequently access the URL and widely disseminated attacks simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.

Changes to Netcraft phishing report processing:

Until recently we have rejected reports for URLs which were already blocked by the Netcraft Toolbar. We now accept reports on URLs which are already blocked if the phishing URL targets a different company to any previously accepted reports.

For example, if we receive a report of a phishing URL at http://[example-domain]/directory/paypal targeting PayPal customers and we decide to block all URLs beginning with http://[example-domain]/directory/ a subsequent report of the URL http://[example-domain-here]/directory/HSBC targeting HSBC customers will now be accepted even though access to that URL is already blocked by our Toolbar.

Each accepted report counts towards your incentives. Therefore, when you see a site with multiple phishing URLs targeting multiple companies, please report them all!

Twitter suffered from some noticeable site availability issues last night, and is still running at a higher than usual latency this morning:

Twitter identified the cause of the incident as an "error with networking equipment", which caused the site to run noticeably slowly, sometimes even causing the fail whale to come out for a swim.

A few hours later, an update revealed that the networking problem had not quite gone away, although the site does appear to be fully functional now. Features such as searching, sidebar data and profile image uploads were temporarily disabled last night to try and stabilize the site's performance.

Netcraft's live uptime graphs for twitter.com can be viewed here.

The most reliable hosting company site in May was New York Internet, responding to all but three of Netcraft's requests. It was served by Apache running on FreeBSD.

Established in 1996, New York Internet is located near Wall Street and maintains its own data centers. The company's core services include dedicated servers, colocation and virtual web hosting.

INetU came a close second with just four failed requests.

INetU is an enterprise managed hosting company located in Allentown, PA. They have been in business since 1996 and notably offer a 100% uptime service level guarantee. Managed services provided by INetU include MySQL and MS SQL database clusters, Exchange servers, virtualization and firewalls. Their clients include Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Northrop Grumman and Canon.

Five of May's top ten most reliable sites used Linux, while three ran on FreeBSD and one on Windows Server 2003.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies' own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

Netcraft has developed a dataset which tracks the changes in the hosting locations of the million busiest websites. Each month we determine the busiest sites by the number of visits from users of the Netcraft Toolbar. This is then combined with detailed hosting information gathered by our Web Server Survey, and compared with the equivalent information from the previous month.

Many sites' location will be unchanged, but some will have moved from one hosting provider to another during the course of the month. Additionally, hosting companies may gain new sites that were not previously in the top million, and lose sites which are no longer present.

The dataset gives a guide to the market share of companies hosting the sites responsible for the great majority of web traffic, and is largely uninfluenced by parked domains, personal sites, shared hosting accounts or the majority of blogs.

Excerpts from March to April 2010

Gains from Not Ranked indicate that a site has entered in to the top million this month. Losses from Not Ranked indicate that the site is no longer in the top million.

Although the top 1000 sites are concentrated amongst the web superpowers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay, the hosting locations of the top million sites are widely fragmented, with a little over 3.25% sufficient for top spot.

An advantage of this dataset over the Hosting Provider Switching Analysis is the ability to analyse movement between competing hosting providers on a per-site basis. With this feature, current and previous hosting locations, netblock, operating system and server software for each site is shown.