SECURITY IN THE NEWS

The Internet and Google Stats

In the September 2007 survey we received responses from 135,166,473 sites. This is an increase of 7.2 million sites since last month, the largest growth in the number of sites recorded by the survey. The rate of growth, around 5.5%, is high but not exceptional by historical standards.

The high growth so far this year has been largely driven by the increasing number of online blogging and social networking communities. This month sees strong growth in the number of sites at Windows Live Spaces, MySpace, and Blogger appearing in the survey. The increased popularity of these blog hosting services continues to have a dramatic effect on the web server market shares: Apache suffered a sudden decline in share when sites at Blogger switched to Google's GFE.

Apache gains over 3 million hostnames, and around 0.9 million active sites this month. But this is not enough to prevent its market share declining closer to the 50% mark, as Microsoft also gained over 3 million hostnames (a large part of which come from MySpace and Live Spaces, both of which use its Internet Information Server).

Blogger.com was offline for an hour early Wednesday as Google's popular service encountered performance problems. Blogger is one of the oldest and largest blogging services, hosting several million free blogs. Google "apologized profusely" for the service interruption.

"Blogger and Blog*Spot had an unexpected outage for an hour this morning, starting around 7AM PDT," Google reported on its Blogger status page. "As of 8AM, all but a few blogs are working properly again." The company didn't offer any additional details on the cause of the outage. The Google search engine and other services were unaffected, as the outage appears to have been isolated to Blogger and blogspot.com.

Human error was responsible for a data center electrical overload that knocked the Cisco Systems web site offline for about three hours Wednesday afternoon, the company said last night. The outage came as Cisco released four security advisories about vulnerabilities in its networking products, and left system administrators unable to access Cisco's support resources. The company was able to alert users through blogs.cisco.com, which is hosted on an another network.

"The issue occurred during preventative maintenance of one of our data centers when a human error caused an electrical overload on the systems," Cisco said in an update. "This caused Cisco.com and other applications to go down. Because of the severity of the overload, the redundancy measures in some of the applications and power systems were impacted as well, though the system did shut down as designed to protect the people and the equipment." The outage can be clearly seen on this performance chart for www.cisco.com:

A dynamically updating chart of the Cisco.com web site performance is available. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides similar charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.

In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position.

The open source Apache has been the leading web server software since the March 1996 Netcraft Web Server Survey. In November 2005, Apache was found on 71 percent of web sites, putting it more than 50 percentage points ahead of Microsoft IIS (20.2 percent). At the time, Apache's market share advantage seemed insurmountable. But less than two years later, Microsoft has narrowed that 50 percent gap to 16.7 percent. The margin is even tighter in active sites, where Apache leads Microsoft by just 12.2 percent.

Apache's lead remains substantial in both categories. It's worth noting that Apache has lost market share to another open source server, lighttpd (1.2% of all sites), and Google (4.4%) as well as Windows. But if Microsoft continues to gain share at its current pace, it could close the gap on Apache sometime in 2008.

Rackspace Managed Hosting will invest $100 million to transform a vacant San Antonio shopping mall into its new headquarters, and plans to add 4,000 new employees over the next five years. The plans were announced this week as part of a deal to keep Rackspace in the San Antonio area, which included a $22 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund.

Rackspace is finalizing an agreement to lease the Windsor Park Mall in Windcrest, a suburb of San Antonio. The company has called San Antonio home since it was founded by three students from Trinity College, and organized as Rackspace in 1998.

"The Governor's Texas Enterprise Fund grant was the key factor in Rackspace's decision to keep its company headquarters in San Antonio and build out a new campus within Windsor Park Mall," said Graham Weston, executive chairman of Rackspace Managed Hosting. "We look forward to San Antonio being our home for years to come."