Netcraft: 215.6m sites detected in February

Netcraft's latest server survey saw the company receive responses from over 215.6 million websites in total, it has been revealed.

Its February survey recorded a gain of more than 30 million sites - or 16 per cent - compared with January, thanks to the launch of 20 million Chinese sites hosted by the QZHTTP web server used by popular instant messaging and blogging service QQ.

The study also showed that the number of websites using Apache as part of their web hosting has increased by 7.8 million, meaning that it is the first server to be utilised by over 100 million sites.

Meanwhile, Microsoft-IIS saw a rise of 1.9 million websites, with most of these stemming from the Windows Live Spaces blogging service, Netcraft said.

Earlier this month, Netcraft indicated that the number of websites using trusted and valid SSL certificates surpassed the one million mark in January this year.

Written by Tim Dunton