In the December 2019 survey we received responses from 1,268,289,402 sites across 243,753,534 unique domain names and 9,430,985 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 40.1 million sites, but a gain of 19,200 domains and 156,000 computers.

nginx gained the largest number of sites (+41.2 million), while Apache lost 50.1 million and Microsoft lost 17.5 million; but in terms of unique domains, all major vendors suffered losses. Microsoft lost the most domains (-2.67 million), followed by Apache (-572,000); and, despite gaining so many sites, nginx lost 422,000 domains.

nginx has continued its strong and steady growth in web-facing computers, this month gaining 58,500 computers compared with Apache's gain of 42,900. nginx is edging ever-closer to Apache's leading market share, which fell by 0.13 percentage points to 35.3%, leaving it only 3.4 points ahead of nginx.

If current trends continue, nginx looks set to overtake Apache at some point in late 2020, which would make it the largest vendor in terms of web-facing computers. nginx has already been in the lead by sites since April 2019, and is also closing in on domains, but is still some way behind Apache in active sites and the top million sites.

Vendor news

OpenLiteSpeed 1.6.4 was released on 18 November. This is the open source version of the LiteSpeed web server, which was first to ship HTTP/3 support in July, and boldly claims to outperform nginx when handling HTTP/3 traffic. More than 20 million sites across 3.9 million domains are running either LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed - both variants exhibit the same "LiteSpeed" server header.

QUIC and HTTP/3 have been supported by Cloudflare's partly nginx-based edge network since September; and in October, Cloudflare released a patch that allows its savoury implementation of these protocols (quiche) to be integrated into the upstream nginx codebase. LiteSpeed's HTTP/3 benchmarks were carried out against this patch.

On 19 November, Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft Azure from its new cloud datacenter regions in Norway. Norway's largest financial services group, DNB Group, has already chosen the new region to migrate services into the cloud in accordance with Norwegian data handling regulations.

Finally, NGINX Plus Release 20 (R20) was released on 3 December. Based on the open source nginx web server, NGINX Plus is a commercial offering, and R20 includes real-time monitoring and logging of rate-limited traffic, enhancements to connection limiting, and some security improvements for HTTP/2.

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In the November 2019 survey we received responses from 1,308,343,327 sites across 243,734,379 unique domain names and 9,274,744 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 7.46 million sites, 2.18 million domains and 230,000 computers.

Amongst the largest web server vendors, Microsoft, nginx, and Google all gained sites this month, increasing by 19.41 million (+10.59%), 10.17 million (+2.38%), and 1.33 million (+3.83%) sites respectively, whilst Apache lost 13.56 million (-3.64%) sites.

While Microsoft gained substantially the most sites overall, this translated to a relatively small increase of domains (+13,000). As a result, it saw the largest loss of domain market share, dropping by 0.18pp. Apache similarly lost market share, with a drop of 0.16pp, despite a large increase in domains (+268,000).

nginx fared better, with an increase in domains (+522,000) almost double that of Apache’s leaving its market share largely unchanged. nginx also saw large gains in web-facing computers (+113,000) and amongst the top million busiest sites (+1,000) giving it the largest market share increases in those metrics.

All of the largest web server vendors were however outpaced this month in domain gains by both Cloudflare and OpenResty, which increased by 1.06 million and 558,000 domains. While the survey tracks these products separately, OpenResty makes uses of the nginx core, integrating it with additional Lua-based modules, while Cloudflare’s own server software was originally based on nginx. The survey now finds a total of 18.22 million domains for the Cloudflare web server software, and 7.10 million for OpenResty.

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In the October 2019 survey we received responses from 1,300,884,420 sites across 241,553,033 unique domain names and 9,045,029 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 9.71 million sites, 421,000 domains and a loss of 23,000 computers.

Amongst the largest web server vendors, only nginx and Google gained sites this month with the two vendors increasing by 5.67 million (+1.34%) and 1.80 million (+5.45%) sites respectively, whilst Apache and Microsoft lost 2.14 million (-0.57%) and 6.77 million (-3.56%) sites.

nginx was in fact the only major web server vendor to see increases in most metrics this month, with gains in domains (+480,000), web-facing computers (+12,000), and top million websites (+472).

Apache saw substantially the largest loss of domains, dropping by 762,000 (-1.04%), with Microsoft following with a smaller drop of 125,000 (-0.26%). These losses were largely offset by increases in domains using other smaller vendors, such as Cloudflare and Tengine, both of which are based on nginx.

In terms of web-facing computers, Microsoft saw the largest loss of 56,000 (-3.46%), followed by Apache which dropped 15,000 (-0.46%). A large proportion of Microsoft's loss came at hosting provider Cloud Innovation which appeared to switch many sites to Tengine.

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