In the April 2008 survey we received responses from 165,719,150 sites. Most of this month's growth of 3.1 million sites is seen in the US, with Google's Blogger service alone adding 1.1 million extra sites.

lighttpd loses a small number of sites this month, but still maintains a significant foothold in our survey with 1.5 million sites. lighttpd is used to serve some of the content for YouTube, Wikipedia and meebo, and is open sourced under the revised BSD license.

Largely due to the growth at Blogger, Google's developer share increases by 0.54% to 6.08% this month, while Apache falls by 0.27% and Microsoft by 0.14%. In absolute terms, this still means that Apache has gained slightly more sites than Google's 1.07 million, while Microsoft gains 847 thousand sites.

While Blogger continues to run a very large number of sites, Google's new App Engine service is unlikely to make much of an impact on our survey in the immediate future. A limit of 10,000 accounts has been put in place during the preview release stage, and each developer can only create a maximum of three applications.

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.

Extended Validation SSL certificates are now a year old, with the total number of EV SSL sites now above 4,000 representing 0.5% of the valid third party certificates that the Netcraft SSL Survey finds on the Internet. Absolute growth of EV SSL certificates has remained largely constant for several months, and the total is dwarfed by the 809,000 sites that use traditional SSL certificates.

A year ago, Netcraft�s SSL Survey found a total of 81 sites using EV SSL certificates, five of which have since reverted to conventional SSL certificates. Interestingly, three of these sites belong to certificate authorities. VeriSign no longer uses EV SSL certificates for either admin-manager.verisign.com or onsite.verisign.com, while Entrust no longer uses an EV SSL certificate for www.entrust.com, although this site redirects users to secure.entrust.com, which does use EV SSL. The two other sites to have stopped using extended validation are www.dunbarvalutrak.com, a system for tracking valuables and cash in transit, and www.senderra.com, a service mark of Avelo Mortgage, L.L.C.

The number of desktops which recognise EV SSL certificates is set to increase this month. On February 12th, Microsoft released the Windows Internet Explorer 7 Installation and Availability update to Windows Server Update Services. After this date, customers who have configured WSUS to auto-approve Update Rollup packages will have all instances of Internet Explorer 6 upgraded to version 7. Microsoft Knowledge Base article 946202 describes how administrators may deploy Internet Explorer 7 using WSUS, or to postpone the update.

For users of Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 turns the address bar green when a user visits a site which offers a valid EV SSL certificate, helping to boost consumer confidence in such sites and reduce fraud. By default, Windows XP users will not see the green address bar unless they install an optional Root Certificates Update, which will enable the use of EV SSL certificates.

In addition to the Internet Explorer 7 push, nightly builds of the Firefox web browser now also support EV SSL certificates, using the VeriSign EV root for testing purposes. Other EV SSL certificates are currently treated as conventional SSL certificates, although when Firefox 3 is ready to be released to the public, it is expected to have full support for all EV SSL certificates.

Further trends and observations are made in Netcraft�s monthly SSL Survey.

Growth is up again this month, with the February 2008 survey receiving responses from 158,209,426 sites. This is an increase of 2.6 million sites, compared with last month's unusually low growth of only 354 thousand.

Apache continues to climb back, now reaching nearly 51% of the market share, while both Microsoft and Google fall slightly in share.

Some strong growth is seen amongst the smaller web servers. LiteSpeed grows by a further 10% this month, now approaching half a million sites with a total of 476 thousand hostnames. The LiteSpeed web server is interchangeable with Apache and is used by the Wordpress blogging system. LiteSpeed was the fastest and most robust server that Wordpress had tested, according to its founding developer, Matthew Mullenweg.

Unusually, America Online's open source AOLserver sees tremendous growth, jumping from 35 thousand to 105 thousand sites in just one month. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server which can be used for large scale, dynamic web sites, but has not seen the release of a new version since 2006. The majority of the new sites served by AOLserver are hosted in Poland.

In the November 2007 survey we received responses from 149,784,002 sites. This is an increase of increase of 7.0M sites since last month, and represents growth of over 40 million sites since the start of the year.