Chicago (IL) – The Internet picked up the pace in February and showed stronger growth, approaching a total size of 160 million websites. Apache stopped the march of Microsoft’s IIS and is gaining share in global Internet server installations : More than half of the web’s servers are running on Apache.

According to Netcraft, the Internet stood at 158,209,426 sites in February, a gain of 2.6 million sites over January. Since the beginning of the year, the Internet has seen unusually slow growth : While monthly gains were in the 4 to 5 million range last year, the web saw just 354,000 additions in January and saw somewhat a bounce-back last month.

Apache is apparently able to take advantage of this scenario, as the software’s share in server installations is back at 50.93%, up 0.33 points from January and 2.6 points from a low of 47.73% In October of last year . Netcraft estimates that 80.6 million web sites are currently running on Apache. Microsoft’s IIS lost 0.23 points in market share over last month, but saw a slight absolute gain, from 55.7 million to 56.3 million sites. Microsoft’s share is at 35.56%, down from a high of 37.13% last October.

Google, which saw its share skyrocket last year, thanks to Blogger, not only lost share, but its overall site count is down as well. Netcraft estimates that Google software was running 8.2 million sites in February, down from 8.3 million in January. Google’s share is at 5.16%, down from 5.33% last month and 5.44% in October 2007.

Netcraft noted two other quickly emerging web servers : Litespeed, which is behind the Wordpress blogging system, is growing at a 10% per month pace and is now estimated at 476,000 sites. America Online’s open source AOLserver has also grown, climbing from 35,000 to 105,000 sites between January and February.