Following a period of huge gains in new hostnames, the growth of the Internet took a break in September and added just 1.08 million new addresses - which is about only one fourth of the increase that was seen in recent months. The count settled at 97,932,447 sites in early October, according to a report released by Netcraft.

While 2006 will break any previous record of hostname growth - Netcraft says that 23.9 million hostnames were added between January and September of this year - we will have to wait another one or two months to celebrate the 100 millionth address on the Internet. The growth rate for this year is about 2.4 million new hostnames per month on average.

Microsoft web servers continue to gain ground on Apache servers in the race of most popular web server software. Microsoft gained 0.09 percentage points or about 432,000 supported addresses and came in at 31.35% market share, according to Netcraft. Apache continued its decline and lost 0.2 points for a current share of 61.44%.