April 2007 Netcraft Survey, a New Player Emerges

The April 2007 Netcraft survey showed continued growth and major shuffling among the Top 4 players. The research firm received responses from 113,658,468, an increase of nearly 6.8 million from January's survey, which yielded 106,875,138 responses.

The number of sites measured surpassed the 100 million mark set in November 2006 and set yet another record.

In April, lighttpd was added to the servers tracked. Lighttpd is an open source server designed for high-performance sites. Lighttpd has a relatively small memory footprint and is optimized for a large number of parallel connections, which has made it popular on sites using AJAX-based apps or those that run via Ruby on Rails, as well as hosting environments for virtual private servers.

Sites using lighttpd as their primary server include the SourceForge, Reddit and Meebo. YouTube and Wikipedia also use it to serve parts of their sites.

In April, lighttpd was detected on 1.38 million sites, which accounts for 1.2 percent of the Web server market. This places it in the Top 4, bumping out Zeus and encroaching on Sun.

When broken down in terms of Web server software, Windows-powered sites again grew the most in market share, gaining a whopping 0.35 percent.

In February, Apache's market share fell below 60 percent for the first time since 2002. Apache still held fast to the top spot with 58.86 percent and picked up some share in March. Microsoft increased its share over the course of the quarter but continued to trail with 31.13 percent.