In the July 2018 survey we received responses from 1,663,673,364 sites, 220,573,018 unique domains, and 7,734,417 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 33.4 million sites, 2.80 million domains, and 120k web-facing computers.

In the web-facing computer market, nginx experienced the largest increase (+3.24%), contributing more than half of the overall growth and surpassing two million web-facing computers this month. As a result, it was the only major vendor to experience a gain in market share. nginx also experienced the largest growth in terms of active sites (+7.87%), and top million sites (+0.71%), further increasing its market share in those metrics. Although nginx has slightly fewer domains than last month, it is generally seeing long-term growth in all metrics, and has gained around 10 million domains over each of the past three years.

Apache remains ahead in terms of domains, active sites, web-facing computers, and sites within the top million. However, it continues to see both long and short-term losses in many metrics, with steadily decreasing counts of domains (-0.53%), active sites (-1.15%), and top million sites (-0.98%).

Microsoft's server software leads by total number of sites, of which it had 670 million this month (a 40.28% share), but sits behind Apache and nginx in most other metrics. Microsoft retains second place in total number of domains with a 26.02% market share, and experienced the largest increase this month of nearly 1.4 million domains. This has increased the gap between it and third-placed nginx, which has been steadily gaining on Microsoft, now leaving them 3.24 percentage points apart.

The one metric in which all major vendors continue to see ubiquitous long-term growth is web-facing computers. Since July 2017, the total number of web-facing computers has increased by 1.14 million (+17.3%). This rate of growth is more than double that seen in the year before between July 2016 and July 2017. Although there have been overall increases in the number of computers running Apache and Microsoft webservers, both have continued to lose market share to their faster growing competitor, nginx.

Google's .app TLD takes off

.app is one of many new gTLDs from ICANN's New gTLD Program. ICANN appointed control of the .app TLD to Google after it won the rights in a $25 million auction against twelve other applicants in February 2015. Google hopes that the appropriately named .app TLD will appeal to websites providing applications and application-related services.

The .app TLD only opened for public registration fairly recently on the 8^th May 2018. This month's survey found 185k unique domains running websites under the .app TLD. Whilst many of these domains return parking pages, a number of fully-fledged sites, such as cash.app, have already been launched, with the Netcraft survey detecting over 15k active sites.

One of .app's marketed features is its inclusion within browsers' HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) preload lists. The .app TLD is one of only thirteen where an HSTS preload policy has been applied to a whole TLD. This TLD-wide HSTS policy means that modern browsers will only access .app websites over a secure HTTPS connection, protecting users from trivial man-in-the-middle attacks.

In the June 2018 survey we received responses from 1,630,322,579 sites, 217,776,658 unique domains, and 7,614,764 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 45 million sites and 162,000 web-facing computers, but a loss of 98,800 domains.

Apache currently leads by most metrics, with the largest market share of domains (35.23%), active sites (41.13%), computers (40.28%), and top million sites (35.54%). However, it continues to gradually decline in market share, losing out to continued growth elsewhere, particularly by nginx. Most of Apache's figures fell this month, with the exception of a small 35k (+1.16%) rise in web-facing computers. Despite this gain in web-facing computers, its share fell slightly, by 0.4 percentage points.

The only metric where Apache does not retain the lead is web sites: Microsoft's server software has held the lead since July 2016. Although Microsoft web servers now account for 601 million sites, or 36.9%, relatively few of these are active sites. Microsoft servers account for 11.8 million active sites, a 6.62% share of the entire active site market, placing it behind both Apache and nginx. Internet Information Services (IIS) accounts for 97.8% of all domains using Microsoft server products, with Microsoft's light-weight HTTPAPI making up just 2.2% of Microsoft's domains. Only 8.0% of the web-facing computers running Microsoft IIS run the latest version available, IIS 10.0, released in October 2016 as part of Windows Server 2016. A greater proportion, 10.1%, are still running IIS 6.0, which reached end-of-life along with Windows Server 2003 almost 3 years ago.

nginx continues to rise in popularity, growing faster than its Apache and Microsoft competitors in all metrics except web sites. Although nginx's 23.35% domain share is still behind Microsoft's 25.73%, its continued growth has it on track to overtake Microsoft in a few months, and potentially even bring Apache within its sights in a couple of years. nginx holds second place in terms of active sites (21.64%), computers (25.84%), and the number of sites within the top one million (24.68%). This month, nginx had the largest gains in all metrics with the exception of overall web sites. Apart from its original distribution, nginx also comes in two other popular variants: Openresty, which is based on an nginx core with additional Lua-based modules, was seen on 2.0 million domains this month; and Tengine, an nginx fork maintained by Chinese ecommerce site Taobao, was seen on 1.2 million domains.

The LiteSpeed web server, which currently accounts for 1.27% of all domains, has also been slowly but steadily gaining adopters. It experienced the 3^rd largest increase in domains this month, gaining 125k, giving it a larger relative increase than Apache, Microsoft, or nginx servers. LiteSpeed has a slightly higher market share of 1.50% of the top million sites and 1.86% of all active sites.

In the May 2018 survey we received responses from 1,584,940,345 sites, 217,875,435 unique domains, and 7,452,628 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 198 million sites, but a gain of 3.36 million domains and 65,600 web-facing computers.

nginx saw moderate growth this month, gaining 1.17 million unique domains. This has increased its market share of domains by 0.19 percentage points, even though it lost 44.2 million sites.

The nginx ecosystem has continued to evolve over the past month, with some notable software releases:

• nginx 1.14.0 was released on the 17 April, which adds HTTP/2 server push support to the nginx stable stream (the recommended release stream for production web servers). HTTP/2 server push can improve the performance of some websites by pre-emptively pushing assets to browser clients, avoiding the need for the client to explicitly make additional GET requests for assets on a page such as images, stylesheets & JavaScript.
• The first production-ready release of NGINX Unit 1.0 was released on the 12 April, ending the product's beta period. NGINX Unit is a web application server that can serve sandboxed Go, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby applications on the same server. It is unique in allowing dynamic reloading & remote configuration via a REST API rather than individual configuration files. A bugfix release, NGINX Unit 1.1, was subsequently made available on 26 April.
• MySQL monitoring support was added to NGINX Amplify on 23 April. This commercial SaaS monitoring product from NGINX Inc. could increase the appeal of transitioning MySQL & PHP applications from Apache-based stacks to nginx-based ones.

Despite losing 59.7 million sites this month, Apache still powers sites on the largest number of unique domains. Apache is also running on 36% of the world's top 1 million websites – 12 percentage points ahead of its closest competitor, nginx.

There was also a 21% reduction of the number websites running Microsoft web server software this month, with the majority of these losses (77%) coming from hosting provider Raksmart, which lost 107 million of these sites. Despite this, the hosting provider gained 49,600 domains that point to Microsoft web servers. Many of the lost websites featured automatically generated content, and so were not counted as Active Sites.