Microblogging platform Tumblr became the tenth largest hosting company by collection of sites inside the November 2012 web server survey

Microblogging platform Tumblr became the tenth largest hosting company by variety of sites within the November 2012 web server survey, which Netcraft released on Thursday.

According to the survey, Tumblr previously hosted its customers sites’ with Softlayer, but now hosts 9.2 million sites by itself netblock.

This shift signifies that Softlayer, once the biggest hosting company on earth in relation to hostnames, have been replaced by Go Daddy, who hosts six million sites greater than Softlayer. Go Daddy said recently that it has seen a 95 percent increase in India resellers for Q3 YOY.

Free blogging services like Tumblr have exploded in popularity, and if there has been any doubt that blogging platforms are something for web hosts to be worried about, perhaps these numbers validate that concern. a up to date report by BusinessWeek says Tumblr generates 15 billion pageviews monthly.

Netcraft’s November 2012 survey received responses from 625,329,303 sites, a rise of four.8 million sites from October’s survey.

In November, Apache continued its declining trend in market share, losing 0.77 percentage points, though continuing to capture the vast majority of the market with a share of 57.23 percent.

Microsoft saw the biggest gain in November, increasing its share by 0.25 percentage points to 16.52 percent this month.

Another trend on this survey was the disappearance of sites using the .tk ccTLD. This was the results of non-existent domains under this ccTLD not being resolved by a wildcard DNS configuration. Ranked because the top phishing TLD, Dot TK introduced an anti-abuse API to permit trusted partners to close down sites using the .tk ccTLD.

Talk back: Do you perceive free blogging sites like Tumblr as a threat for your business- Tell us in a comment.