Web entangles folk at quickening pace

THE INTERWEB is growing at a faster rate than ever before, according to a survey released by Netcraft.

Netcraft runs a monthly web server survey that recently detected 142,805,398 web sites – which is about 7.6 million higher than the previous month. This means that the internet is currently growing at a rate of five per cent a month.

While Apache remains the most popular software running web servers, it is beginning to cede defeat to Microsoft and Google at an alarming rate.

The main drive behind the growth seems to be coming from Myspace, Microsoft Live, and Google Blogger which gained more than 1 million sites each in the past month. As a result, Apache-powered servers are hemorrhaging market shares. According to Netcraft, Apache is currently installed on 47.73 per cent of web servers. This number has fallen from 60.64% this past January.

In the same time frame, Microsoft IIS was able to increase its market share from 30.67% to 37.13%. Basically, Apache gained 1 million sites over the past month, while Microsoft gained more than 3 million.

Netcraft stated that October is the first month in which Microsoft software was running on more than 50 million servers worldwide. Google is also beginning to enter the web hosting arena with its software running on 7.8 million sites or 5.44% of all sites. µ