Website growth buoys Apache share

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The latest survey of web servers hosting internet websites has shown Apache is continuing to recover after steep falls in market share over the last 18 months.

The survey, by web hosting provider Netcraft, also found the total number of websites hosted on the internet across all domains during last month had grown to 155,583,825.

But the findings suggest Apache is making up lost ground on main competitors, Microsoft and Google, despite a slow in the growth of sites from December 2007, where it found 5.4 million new sites were created, to January 2008, which saw only 354,000 added.

Dale Vile, managing director of analyst firm Freeform Dynamics told IT PRO the website growth identified in the survey may simply reflect the seasonal fact that many projects reach completion before the end-of-year or that people have time to construct websites more over the festive holidays than at the beginning of the year.

"It's so much easier for individuals or small businesses, for instance to set up a website with the number web hosting options available to them nowadays," he said. "That's not quite the same as having to make server choices, doing it in-house a couple of years ago."

The evidence that providers are influencing server technology choice more than users is backed by the Netcraft findings, which showed the Apache share of web servers grew past 50 per cent in January.

It said Apache's share had been negatively affected over that period by the increasing number of blog sites in the survey on large providers like Microsoft and Google, using their own server software. But it is also benefiting from growth through other blog providers, like multiply.

The survey also showed there has been significant growth in recent months for some newer entrants to the market. While lighttpd's share, of active sites particularly, has stagnated, there has been good growth for open source, Russian-developed nginx web server, which passed 0.5 per cent of the market share last month.

There was also good growth for LiteSpeed, the commercial web server designed as a high-performance drop-in replacement for Apache, which passed 400,000 hostnames last month. Netcraft said this partly due to its use by blogging provider WordPress.com.

Vile added: "The leading edge developers tend to go for web servers outside the mainstream because they can, so they are an interesting group to watch in terms of which web servers they prefer.

"Otherwise, I imagine a lot of organisations may be caught between Microsoft Server generations and have decided to go with Apache and wait until they are ready to move Windows Server 2008 after it's released."

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