Thursday, March 27, 2008

In the March 2008 survey, we received responses from 162,662,052 sites. Growth has continued to rise over the past few months, with this month seeing a gain of four and a half million new sites.

The largest changes this month are once again seen amongst the blogging and social network providers. Google increases its developer share by gaining 842 thousand hostnames; most of which are used for blogspot.com blogs. Although MySpace gained nearly 200 thousand hostnames this month, the total number of active sites fell noticeably after many more users marked their profiles as private.

Apple has recently started hosting sites created with their own iWeb program. iWeb is a template-based web page creation tool, and the latest version is included with Apple's iLife package. The majority — more than 24 thousand — of these iWeb sites are being served from a single IP address, using the new AppleDotMacServer-1B5626 web server.

While Google is the largest developer to gain share this month, the LiteSpeed web server continues to show very rapid growth on the internet — growing by more than a quarter this month — and is now serving 605 thousand websites around the world.

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - March 2008

Top Developers

MySpace has become one of the first very busy sites to adopt the use of Windows Server 2008, using the new Microsoft operating system on its redirection site at msplinks.com.

MySpace started using the msplinks.com site last year, in a bid to protect its users against spamming and phishing attacks. When users added a link into MySpace, the URL would be replaced with a link to msplinks.com, which would then redirect to the intended URL. This gave MySpace greater control over the links that originated from their site, allowing them to disable the links if they are found to point to spam, viruses or phishing sites.

MySpace initially received criticism for implementing their redirection system, as it resulted in all destination URLs being converted to lowercase. For some users, this broke links to popular sites such as YouTube, which uses case-sensitive URLs for its videos (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU).

While the msplinks.com server exhibits the TCP/IP characteristics of Windows Server 2008, and runs Microsoft's IIS 7.0 web server software, the main MySpace site at myspace.com continues to use IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003. Netcraft's Web Server Survey contains more than 8 million sites hosted by myspace.com.

'Msplinks' that are no longer in service cause the user to be redirected to a MySpace error page, which states that, "...the link was very naughty, and, much like head lice, had to be eliminated before it spread." The page then goes on to describe the possible reasons for the link being disabled.

A casual glance at the msplinks.com homepage reveals a distinct lack of content; however, the purpose of the site is contained in a hidden message written in white text, which can be viewed by highlighting the contents of the page, or viewing the HTML source: