Tech Shout!

According to Netcraft’s latest web server survey, the amount of hostnames on the Internet has doubled within the past three years.

At the end of March, Netcraft said it recognized a total of 80,655,992 websites, which represents an increase of 3.1 million sites on the Internet since the end of February. Netcraft had reported the existence of about 40 million web sites in March of 2003.

Apache, the most popularly used free web server software suffered a significant slide in market share in March, Netcraft said. Compared to the previous month, Apache web server lost six percentage points from 68.7% to 62.7% due to a large-scale migration from Apache to Microsoft software at domain registrar GoDaddy. On the hand Microsoft increased almost five percentage points and stands now at 25.2%.

Netcraft believes, domain registrar GoDaddy will shift a total of 4.4 million hostnames from Apache to Windows Server 2003.