The Internet added 4.4 million new hostnames during July - the single largest gain of new sites in a single month, according to Internet services firm Netcraft. The growth surpassed the previous records set in June of this year, which saw a 3.96 million site gain.

The main reason for the quick growth, Netcraft said, is the battle between Microsoft and Google to attract users to their blog services. Both firms contributed significantly to drive the Internet to a new record number of websites, which now stands at 92,615,362 websites. According to the firm, Microsoft added about 858,000 new sites, while Google gained about 568,000 during the month.

Regular hosting companies added far less new sites, but still achieved respectable numbers : GoDaddy was responsible for about 368,000 new hostnames, while competing 1&1 gained about 264,000, Netcraft said.

Microsoft continued its pace in web server market share. According to Netcraft, 30.13% (+0.65 points) of all web servers are now based on Microsoft software ; Apache lost 0.57 points and now stands at 62.52%.