According to the June report of the research company Netcraft, the number of sites operating on the Internet as of May 31 reached 122,000 635 sites, which is 3.87 million sites more than a month earlier. Analysts say that the increase in the number of sites as such for more than a year is almost imperceptible. The main increase is due to the emergence of new blogs on popular services.
On Google’s blog services in May, the increase in new sites amounted to 521,000 sites; about 532,000 blogs appeared on Microsoft’s facilities. The most active registrars were GoDaddy, which in a month added 455,000 sites to its database and Demand Media – 245,000 new sites.
If we talk about the areas in which the new sites operate, the analysts who spoke about the boom of social networks at the end of 2006 were right – most of all there are graphic and video hosting sites, as well as sites of various communities.
Now let us turn to the software web server market, on the basis of which, in fact, websites operate. Netcraft notes that over the past 12 years, 4 software servers have been continuously present in their rankings – Apache, Microsoft IIS, Zeus and Sun (all the variety of Sun Microsystems servers is available). However, over the past two months, analysts had to expand the list of servers twice.
Last month, Lighttpd server broke into the rating. Analysts point out that the new lighttpd server takes up very little space on server hard drives, and it is also very resource intensive and optimized to handle a large number of simultaneous client connections, which made it popular for hosting projects developed on the basis of environments such as Ruby or ajax. Such large resources as Sourceforge, Reddit, Meebo also moved to lighthttpd, and YouTube and Wikipedia servers are partly based on this development.
In the same month, Google has transferred all its projects to a web server of its own production GFE, which, although it “stands with both feet” on Apache, is formally an independent product.
As a result, the June distribution looks like this: the Apache server has lost a record 7.37% of the market and now its share is 51.11% of the total number of sites, Microsoft IIS comes second (total for all versions), which in May gathered modest 0, 37% and its share was 35.03%, Google immediately went to the third place, which immediately accounted for 6.59%. The fourth, fifth and sixth places were taken by lighttpd (0.42%), Zeus (0.38%) and Sun (0.38%), respectively.
Also today, its quarterly report was presented by Verisign, the largest network provider and domain name registrar .com. The Verisign report reflects the main trends in the domain industry in the first quarter of 2007. Verisign noted that the total number of registered domains on the Web reached 128 million, which is 31% more than a year ago and 6% more than in the previous quarter (end of 2006).
The number of new domain registrations has reached 10.7 million units, which, according to Verisign, indicates a continuing growth in demand for domain names. At the same time, in this quarter, there were 8% less domains registered than at the end of 2006, but 25% more than in the first quarter of 2006.
The number of second-level domains registered directly from ccTDLs (Country Code Top Level Domain Names) today reached 45.7 million domains, which is 5% more than last quarter. Domain .com remains the most popular in the first quarter of 2007, its share was 7 million new registrations in the world, which is 13% more than in the last quarter of 2006. In total, over the past two years, the number of registrations in the .com zone is growing by an average of 28% annually.
According to statistics from Verisign, an average of about 30 billion requests for name resolution were made daily to the company’s DNS servers in the first quarter of 2007.
