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In the May 2010 survey we received responses from 206,026,787 sites.

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Four of the five major web servers gained hostnames since last month. Google lost for the second month in a row with a drop of 1.4M hostnames, predominantly caused by expired sites in its blogging system.

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Although Microsoft served 780K more hostnames this month, it actually lost 235K active sites. As with Google, this was due to a significant loss of blogging sites.

The biggest change this month was a 1.9M increase in hostnames served using Apache. The largest contributor to this was a growth of 561K sites by Next Dimension Inc, but the majority of this consisted of parked sites on a single IP address.

Rackspace recently reported that cloud computing sales were predicted to hit �8.5 billion ($12.6 bn) by 2014. Netcraft has seen significant growth in this sector. The number of sites hosted on Amazon EC2 increased for the eighth month in a row. There were 365K Amazon cloud sites in this month's survey, a growth of 33% since December 2009.

One of the busiest sites hosted on Amazon EC2 as determined by visits from the Netcraft Toolbar is www.farmville.com. With over 75 million users, Farmville is a game available through Facebook in which players can grow crops and raise livestock.

In the April 2010 survey we received responses from 205,368,103 sites — a slight fall in the number of sites found.

Three of the five major web servers lost hostnames compared to last month. The two servers to gain sites in the April survey are Microsoft, with over half a million more sites than in March, and nginx with just over 300k new sites. For nginx this reverses the trend of the last three months, when it lost sites due to stale WordPress blogs being expired from the survey.

The survey results this month also show how Chile's internet infrastructure has been affected by the earthquakes which hit the country at the end of February and beginning of March. The two major earthquakes had magnitudes of 8.8 and 6.9 respectively and it is estimated that they took out up to 60% of networks. Despite the scale of the disaster, the number of hostnames seen in Chile this month fell by only 12%.

In the March 2010 survey we received responses from 206,675,938 sites.

This represents a slight fall in the number of hostnames seen since last month and consequently most of the major web servers experienced small losses in hostnames relative to the February 2010 survey: only lighttpd and Google gained hostnames, with increases of 560k and 275k respectively. The overall gain for lighttpd originates from 785k parked hostnames at SAVVIS in Australia, catapulting the proportion of hostnames using lighttpd in the country from 2.29% in February to 37.80% this month.

For the third month in a row nginx lost sites, recording 1.3M fewer hostnames in March than in February. This is again due to losses from Wordpress as stale blogs continue to be expired from the survey. nginx also lost in terms of active sites (down 1.2M since last month) while the other major web servers saw minor gains in this metric.

In the February 2010 survey we received responses from 207,316,960 sites.

The biggest change of the month belongs to Apache with a 1.6M increase in hostnames. It was closely followed by Microsoft which saw a growth of 1.1M.

After a year long consistent rise nginx is experiencing a loss for a second month in a row as inactive weblogs on WordPress and 163.com are expired out of the survey. This month nginx had a decrease of 1.5M hostnames, which brings its total down to the number of hostnames it had in October.

China Internet Network Information Center has recently announced a change in the .cn domain name registration regulations. Since December 14th individuals can no longer register .cn domains and a paper application has to be submitted to register one along with photocopies of the company business license and registrant ID. While this has reduced the frequency of .cn domains in spam, it does not seem to have affected the growth of the domain. Netcraft has discovered 49k new hostnames in .cn this month, compared to 37k in December, 59k in November and 39k in October.

In the September 2009 survey we received responses from 226,099,841 sites, reflecting a modest rise of 149 thousand sites.