may the force be with you

n the July 2005 survey we received responses from 67,571,581 sites. The gain of 2.76 million hostnames from June is the second-largest monthly increase in the history of our survey, as 2005 continues to shape up as a historic year for Internet growth. The only larger gain was a 3.3 million hostname increase in March 2003, which ended months of stagnation and kicked off 30 consecutive months of positive growth for the Web.

Factors in the dramatic growth include:

• Increasing use of the Internet by small businesses as web sites and online storefronts become more affordable.
• The explosive growth of weblogs, a growing number of which are purchasing domains for branding purposes.
• Speculation in the market for domain names, buoyed by rising resale prices and the ability to generate revenue via pay-per-click advertising on parked domains.
• Strong sales of online advertising, especially keyword-based contextual ads that support business models for both domain parking and commercial weblogs.

The Internet has added 10.7 million hostnames in the first seven months of the year. Barring a dramatic slowdown, 2005 should easily exceed the record growth of 16 million hostnames in 2000.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - July 2005

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - July 2005

Top Developers

Developer	June 2005	Percent	July 2005	Percent	Change
Apache	45172895	69.70	47030635	69.60	-0.10
Microsoft	13131361	20.26	13871645	20.53	0.27
Sun	1849471	2.85	1842812	2.73	-0.12
Zeus	580844	0.90	608121	0.90	0.00

Active Sites

Developer	June 2005	Percent	July 2005	Percent	Change
Apache	20680650	69.98	21313596	69.81	-0.17
Microsoft	6708549	22.70	6959561	22.80	0.10
Zeus	219798	0.74	238881	0.78	0.04
Sun	220726	0.75	226001	0.74	-0.01

Totals for Active Servers Across All Domains
June 2000 - July 2005

Sun is the sum of sites running SunONE, iPlanet-Enterprise, Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce & Netsite-Communications.

Microsoft is the sum of sites running Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS.

Platform groupings are here.

source:http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/01/july_2005_web_server_survey.html