Apache Grow by 1.6M Hostnames in 2009

Having sifted through responses from more than 207 million sites, UK-based Internet services firm Netcraft (netcraft.com) released the results of its February 2010 web server survey, which found that Apache saw the biggest change with a 1.6 million increase in hostnames, closely followed by Microsoft, which saw a growth of 1.1 million.

After consistently rising in popularity throughout 2009, February marked the second month in which nginx experienced a loss as inactive weblogs on WordPress and 163.com expired from the survey. nginx saw a loss of 1.5 million hostnames, bringing its total number of hostnames down to October levels.

Over the past few months, domain registration has been the subject of new rules in China to try and clean up the country's .CN domains, which have become so synonymous with spam, pornography, fraud and other illegal activities that many networks outside China have started blocking incoming emails with links to .CN domains. The China Internet Network Information Center has imposed harsher rules for the registration of .cn domain names. For instance, individuals can no longer register .CN domains, and organizations that want a domain must submit a paper application along with photocopies of thier business license and registrant ID.

It seems that China's goal of curbing spam activity has been largely met, and, according to Netcraft, it does not seem to have affected the growth of the domain. Netcraft discovered 49,000 new .CN hostnames this month compared to 37,000 in December, 59,000 in November, and 39,000 in October.

February is also the second month that qq.com, which is used for a popular social media network in China, has not been among the top web servers, since qq.com apparently made all the blogs on its network private and stopped reporting blog activity, making Netcraft unable to tell which blogs are active. In the December 2009 survey, qq.com accounted for nearly 13 percent of servers across all domains.