Netcraft's December survey showed Apache gained 2.47 million sites
Web analytics firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) announced last Wednesday that it has released the results of its December 2008 Web Server Survey.
This month’s survey received responses from 186,727,854 sites, an increase of 1.56 million websites since last month, which saw feedback from 185,167,895 sites.
In October, Netcraft received responses from 182,226,259 sites.
According to the December survey, the largest growth was demonstrated by Apache, which gained 2.47 million sites. More than half of these were attributed to the net hostname growth at ThePlanet.com, which once again includes a number of .pl domains.
In its September Web Server Survey, Netcraft explained that many of the .pl sites were link farms hosted on Polish domain names, and that many of them contained little more than pornographic text links to other sites within the same domain.
Netcraft implies that the .pl sites may be part of a network of sites (unknowingly) hosted by The Planet , that may have links to malware.
“Many of these new sites redirect to another site hosted by ThePlanet.com, which appears to offer PornTube videos, but in fact directs visitors towards a site which Google believes to be malware,” writes Netcraft in the accompanying report.
Since its notable increase last month, Yahoo! Traffic Server showed another large gain in December, with 1.68 million sites running on YTS. It is believed Yahoo! uses YTS to provide reverse proxy and connection management in its services.
And nginx showed the third largest growth this month, climbing by more than 10 percent to reach 3.35 million sites. Nginx now has nearly 1.8 percent of the worldwide market share, “an impressive feat, given that it is the work of just one man, Igor Sysoev,” says Netcraft.
