In the November 2014 survey we received responses from 947,029,805 sites and 4,994,577 web-facing computers.
Despite the dramatic loss of almost 82 million sites since October, the number of web-facing computers increased by over 23 thousand (+0.47%) this month. Automatically generated content and wildcard sites are often used for activities such as domain holding and search-engine results manipulation, where the majority of the sites will not receive human visitors and therefore the resources required to run the sites are minimal. This is clearly demonstrated this month, with over half of the net loss of sites being attributed to a single IP address that was previously hosting parked websites.
The most significant contributor to the increase in web-facing computers was nginx, with almost 16k more computers using the web server this month. Apache and Microsoft both experienced small losses in market share as a result, continuing the trend seen over the past few years.
nginx gained a number of notable high-traffic websites in this month's survey. After several years of using lighttpd, the SourceForge download site (downloads.sourceforge.net, traffic rank #411) has switched to nginx, and gaming news site pcgamer.com (#1339) has also started using nginx with Rackspace's Cloud Load Balancing as a Service product.
Amongst the top million websites, Apache's market share has continued its slow decline. Ever since Netcraft started publishing these figures, Apache has commanded more than half of this market sector. This month, however, Apache has reached its lowest market share ever: 50.01%. Although it still clings on to more than half of the market this month, it looks unlikely to retain it for long. Microsoft and Google have also been losing share amongst the top million sites, all making room for nginx, which has muscled its way up to 20.4%.
New top level domains are continuing to add a modest number of sites to the survey each month. One of this month's fastest growing new TLDs is .audio, which is run by Uniregistry, where it is pitched as a dedicated online space for sound, musicians, engineers and producers. More than 17,000 sites are already using this TLD.
German states and cities are also contributing to the growth in new TLDs. For example, .koeln is now used by 14,000 sites, and .bayern is already used by more than 10,000 websites since it entered general availability on 30 September 2014.
Just in time for this year's Black Friday events on November 28th, the .blackfriday TLD was also launched recently by Uniregistry. More than 10,000 sites have adopted this domain in the space of a month, including amazon.blackfriday and target.blackfriday, which redirect to each company's main US website. Uniregistry also provides another seasonal TLD, .christmas, which was found to be used by 12,000 sites in this month's survey.
NCC Group released its 124-page .trust Technical Policy [pdf] last month, which outlines a stringent set of criteria which must be met by registrants of .trust domains. Many of these policies relate to security, dictating both what must and must not be done – the table of contents alone contains 71 instances of "Do not". The policies go far beyond the typical fraud prevention requirements set by most other registries, with a heavy emphasis on web application security. For example, websites which use .trust domains must serve all content over an encrypted HTTPS connection, must not use inline JavaScript or the eval() function, must provide an appropriate Content Security Policy header, and must be free from open redirects.
NCC Group bought the .trust TLD earlier this year from Deutsche Post, which had originally obtained it from ICANN in 2013. With NCC Group claiming that security compliance is externally verifiable, it anticipates that all sites using the .trust TLD will be recognised as trustworthy.
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
Continue reading...
Despite the dramatic loss of almost 82 million sites since October, the number of web-facing computers increased by over 23 thousand (+0.47%) this month. Automatically generated content and wildcard sites are often used for activities such as domain holding and search-engine results manipulation, where the majority of the sites will not receive human visitors and therefore the resources required to run the sites are minimal. This is clearly demonstrated this month, with over half of the net loss of sites being attributed to a single IP address that was previously hosting parked websites.
The most significant contributor to the increase in web-facing computers was nginx, with almost 16k more computers using the web server this month. Apache and Microsoft both experienced small losses in market share as a result, continuing the trend seen over the past few years.
nginx gained a number of notable high-traffic websites in this month's survey. After several years of using lighttpd, the SourceForge download site (downloads.sourceforge.net, traffic rank #411) has switched to nginx, and gaming news site pcgamer.com (#1339) has also started using nginx with Rackspace's Cloud Load Balancing as a Service product.
Amongst the top million websites, Apache's market share has continued its slow decline. Ever since Netcraft started publishing these figures, Apache has commanded more than half of this market sector. This month, however, Apache has reached its lowest market share ever: 50.01%. Although it still clings on to more than half of the market this month, it looks unlikely to retain it for long. Microsoft and Google have also been losing share amongst the top million sites, all making room for nginx, which has muscled its way up to 20.4%.
New top level domains are continuing to add a modest number of sites to the survey each month. One of this month's fastest growing new TLDs is .audio, which is run by Uniregistry, where it is pitched as a dedicated online space for sound, musicians, engineers and producers. More than 17,000 sites are already using this TLD.
German states and cities are also contributing to the growth in new TLDs. For example, .koeln is now used by 14,000 sites, and .bayern is already used by more than 10,000 websites since it entered general availability on 30 September 2014.
Just in time for this year's Black Friday events on November 28th, the .blackfriday TLD was also launched recently by Uniregistry. More than 10,000 sites have adopted this domain in the space of a month, including amazon.blackfriday and target.blackfriday, which redirect to each company's main US website. Uniregistry also provides another seasonal TLD, .christmas, which was found to be used by 12,000 sites in this month's survey.
NCC Group released its 124-page .trust Technical Policy [pdf] last month, which outlines a stringent set of criteria which must be met by registrants of .trust domains. Many of these policies relate to security, dictating both what must and must not be done – the table of contents alone contains 71 instances of "Do not". The policies go far beyond the typical fraud prevention requirements set by most other registries, with a heavy emphasis on web application security. For example, websites which use .trust domains must serve all content over an encrypted HTTPS connection, must not use inline JavaScript or the eval() function, must provide an appropriate Content Security Policy header, and must be free from open redirects.
NCC Group bought the .trust TLD earlier this year from Deutsche Post, which had originally obtained it from ICANN in 2013. With NCC Group claiming that security compliance is externally verifiable, it anticipates that all sites using the .trust TLD will be recognised as trustworthy.
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
Apache
385,354,99437.45%350,853,79837.05%-0.40Microsoft
345,485,41933.58%306,029,30732.31%-1.26nginx
148,330,19014.42%139,130,99214.69%0.28Google
19,431,0261.89%19,560,2062.07%0.18
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
Apache
90,599,50550.85%90,850,28551.10%0.25nginx
25,588,94314.36%25,987,02214.62%0.26Microsoft
21,700,87412.18%20,716,80911.65%-0.53Google
13,692,1247.68%13,787,2707.76%0.07For more information see Active Sites
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
Apache
501,92250.19%500,11550.01%-0.18nginx
203,43920.34%204,09220.41%0.07Microsoft
125,23512.52%124,60712.46%-0.06Google
26,3022.63%25,9952.60%-0.03
DeveloperOctober 2014PercentNovember 2014PercentChange
Apache
2,360,06147.47%2,368,86947.43%-0.04Microsoft
1,525,27830.68%1,519,57630.42%-0.26nginx
513,96110.34%529,87010.61%0.27Continue reading...