Earlier this week Web analytics firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) released the results of its January server survey of 185,497,213 sites, reflecting an uncharacteristic loss of 1.23 million sites since the December survey, which showed an increase of 1.56 million.

Despite the overall loss in the number of websites, Apache’s (www.apache.org) share of the web server market grew by 1.27 million sites this month, a growth of more than one percent. This expanded its lead over Microsoft IIS (www.microsoft.com), which is trailing after falling to less than a third of the market.

With its number of sites falling by 0.9 percent over the month, Microsoft IIS showed the largest loss of any web server after more than two million blogging sites running on it expired. - to me this statement is very interesting as Microsoft has a good and solid web hosting platform now, however i believe the issue is that the control panel that most web hosting companies use (cPanel) that does not support windows, and further complicating the issue is that most small web hosting companies only offer Linux (apache) hosting.

Also, noted was the fact that google has taken a loss because of GFE. Also hit hard was GFE, which is primarily used by Google’s (www.google.com) Blogger service to publish blogs under the blogspot.com domain. It lost almost 600,000 sites.

On an up note, however, nginx (www.nginx.net), a lightweight web server/reverse proxy and e-mail proxy, has continued its growth from last month, gaining more than 100,000 sites and increasing its market share to 1.87 percent.

Further down the field, Netcraft reported that sites hosted on httpd and WebserverX increased by more than 20 percent each. While only occupying a relatively small part of the market, both web servers have made large strides, with httpd growing to around 236,000 thousand sites and WebserverX to 154,000.

So the decline in websites over the last months is not that surprising, i think you will see an increase again in the coming months