June 23, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web analytics firm Netcraft (netcraft.com) announced this week the results of its June 2008 web server survey, which received responses from 172,338,726 sites.
This month, the total number of sites increased by 3.9 million, with Theplanet.com seeing the largest gain with 632,000 new sites. The increase enables the company to keep its position as the sixth largest web host in the world.
Meanwhile, Bahamas-based Secure Hosted Limited (securehost.com) experienced a large switch, gaining 1.2 million sites from Nameview (nameview.com). Secure Hosted is an offshore web host that offers hosting and dedicated servers from its data centers located in the Bahamas and Jamaica.
The majority of the new sites at Secure Hosting Limited were using the Lighttpd web server both before and after the switch, giving Lighttpd about the same market share this month.
However, Microsoft's IIS web server has gained 2 million sites, increasing its market share by 0.36 percent. Despite this large boost, Apache still remains in the top position with a 49.1 percent market share.
The survey also revealed that LiteSpeed lost more than 600,000 sites this month, while nginx more than doubled its total number of sites by gaining more than a million sites.
The gain can be attributed to WordPress blogging system recently converting all of its load balancers to nginx, using the upstream hash module to achieve eight to nine thousand requests per second.
In last month's Netcraft web server survey, the total number of sites increased by 2.7 million, with 554 thousand new sites being hosted by XL Internet Services.
