(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web analytics firm Netcraft announced on Wednesday it has released the results of its November 2008 Web Server Survey.
According to the most recent survey, the web has seen a growth of almost three million sites, totaling 185,167,895 websites. In October, Netcraft received responses from 182,226,259 sites.
Once again, Apache led this month’s growth, gaining 1.3 million sites and expanding its share to 93 million while Microsoft-IIS trailed close behind, seeing a growth of 1.1 million sites to reach 64 million. And Google, which only recently made its appearance on this survey, grew by 509,000 to total its share to nearly 11 million websites.
A notable difference Netcraft pointed out this month was the appearance of 221,000 sites hosted by Yahoo!, specifically running on the Yahoo! Traffic Server proxy. According to the analytics firm, last month’s survey identified around 521 sites that claimed to be running on YTS, but it couldn’t be confirmed.
Yahoo! is thought to use YTS to provide reverse proxy and connection management in its services, says Netcraft, but many of the company’s sites were previously configured to omit the server header in their http responses.
YTS serves around 12 billion requests per day and was originally developed by Inktomi as a proxy cache for web traffic and streaming media, says the analytics firm. Inktomi has since been acquired by Yahoo!.
Some of the sites believed to run on YTS include Bix, delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Groups.
For a further breakdown of the number of websites found for major server vendors, visit here.
Although known for its monthly web server surveys and tracking down the most reliable hosting company websites every month, last week Netcraft released a dataset listing the hosting locations of the one million busiest websites on the web, as well as the web hosts that back these popular websites. The dataset will also be updated monthly and is available on a company license basis.
