At the end of September, Microsoft announced the migration of Windows Live Spaces sites to WordPress.com, which will happen over the next few months.
The 30 million people that use Windows Live Spaces will have to migrate their blogs to the WordPress.com blogging platform and they have six months to do so, before Spaces is shut down.
The old Spaces URLs will also be redirected to the new blogs, so that no visitor will get lost along the way.
WordPress is powering more than 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is visited monthly by over 250 million people.
Wordpress.com uses load-balanced hosting at Layered Technologies and Peer1 and this month both companies saw modest increases in the number of sites using nginx (60k and 48k hostnames respectively). For the moment, Windows Live Spaces sites in the sites.live.com domain whose blogs have been moved to WordPress.com remain online redirecting users to their new location.
For example, http://mikese.mobile.spaces.live.com still exists served by Microsoft but when accessed redirects to http://mikese.wordpress.com, which is running nginx. In contrast, blogs on their own domains will result in losses for Microsoft as the DNS can simply be updated with no need for redirection. An example of a site in this category is http://ozzie.net which switched over in the middle of October; at the time it was not clear if this change from IIS on Windows to nginx on Linux was a deliberate move by Ray Ozzie as he prepared to step down as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, though it now appears to be part of the wider Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com migration. Since WordPress.com is served by nginx, we expect to see a continued increase in sites using nginx as the migration takes place.
Despite the changes described above, Microsoft gained 3.1M hostnames this month, mostly in the United States. The largest increases were 942k hostnames at GoDaddy and 717k hostnames at Demand Media Inc.
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