In the January 2021 survey we received responses from 1,197,982,359 sites across 262,949,225 unique domains and 10,649,817 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 95,900 computers, but a loss of 30.13 million sites and 465,000 domains.

Apache, nginx and Microsoft all lost sites this month. Apache suffered the largest losses with 16.4 million fewer sites, a significant number of which came from a single hosting provider, Enzu. This was followed by nginx which lost 11.9 million sites and Microsoft which lost 7.8 million, both seeing losses across a number of hosting providers. nginx continues to lead in market share with 33.3% (-0.15 pp), ahead of Apache at 26.4% (-0.7 pp).

The number of domains powered by these web servers also fell this month. Microsoft observed the largest drop of 2.2 million domains, while nginx and Apache lost 903,000 and 303,000. This resulted in a small loss of market share for all three, the largest drop being seen by Microsoft which fell 0.8 percentage points to 6.3%. nginx dropped 0.3 percentage points of domain market share, though still powers 30% of all domains. The majority of the domains lost by these largest web server vendors remain in the survey, with individual hosting providers switching large numbers to other server vendors. One such movement involved around 1.2 million domains hosted by Cogeco Cable Canada that previously identified as nginx but now respond with a DOSarrest server banner.

Despite these losses, the total number of web-facing computers for both Apache and nginx grew this month. nginx gained 68,000 computers, increasing its market share by 0.3 percentage points to 34.7%, while Apache’s small gain of 6,200 resulted in a slight drop in market share to 33% (-0.2 pp).

Although both only have a small amount of web-facing computer market share, LiteSpeed and OpenResty both saw good relative growth this month. LiteSpeed gained 3,400 computers (+7.7% compared to last month) and OpenResty gained 5,700 computers (+6.8%).

The number of the top million sites powered by Apache, Microsoft and LiteSpeed all grew this month. Apache observed the highest growth with 4,043 sites, increasing its market share to 25% (+0.4 pp) and maintaining its lead over nginx which lost 105 sites this month. LiteSpeed gained 1,700 new sites, an increase of 9.4% over December.

Other vendor and hosting news

• Lighttpd 1.4.58 was released on 27 December, after the release of 1.4.57 on 17 December. These updates include a number of bug fixes.
• Microsoft Azure added support for Availability Zones in its South Central US datacenter region. Availability zones are multiple interconnected data centers within the same region, providing resiliency in the event of a data center outage. This addition means that Microsoft now has 15 public Azure regions with Availability Zones.
• A number of Google services suffered from a partial outage on 14 December, caused by a failure of Google’s authentication service. As well as affecting a number of Google services such as Gmail and YouTube, the issue also prevented users from authenticating to the Google Cloud Console and managing their infrastructure. Google Cloud Platform services themselves were largely unaffected by the outage.

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In the December 2020 survey we received responses from 1,228,111,563 sites across 263,413,876 unique domains and 10,553,965 web-facing computers. The reflects a loss of 1.84 million sites, 374,000 domains, and 10,600 computers.

Overall, nginx lost the largest number of sites this month (-3.15 million), while Apache gained most (3.04 million); yet in terms of active sites, nginx gained 411,000, while Apache gained only 100,000.

Microsoft, Apache and nginx each suffered losses in their total number of domains, although nginx's loss was small enough that its market share increased slightly. 30.3% of the world's domains are now powered by nginx, compared with 26.4% powered by Apache. Despite losses affecting each major webserver vendor, the causes were independent in each case; for example nginx’s 34,000 loss resulting from a drop of 387,000 domains at Freenom.

OpenResty is continuing to show strong growth, with GoDaddy's use of the web server for its parked domains. It now powers 71.3 million sites across 36.9 million domains and 84,680 web-facing computers.

The number of web-facing computers running nginx, Apache and Microsoft web server software also fell this month. The largest loss was 38,600 web-facing computers for nginx, which took its total down to 3.63 million and its share down by 0.33 percentage points to 34.4%, leaving it just over one percentage point ahead of Apache. Microsoft lost 14,700 computers, while Apache lost 5,820.

Improvements to the million busiest sites methodology has resulted in a number of market share movements. The biggest drop was seen for Apache, with its share down by 4.3 percentage points. Although it continues to lead this market with a share of 24.6%, nginx is now much closer behind with a 23.2% share of the top million, despite also experiencing a drop, and losing 2.0 percentage points. Cloudflare experienced the largest increase, up 1.4 percentage points to reach a 15.2% market share.

Other vendor and hosting news

• The first release candidate of Caddy 2.3 was announced on 12 December.
• nginx 1.19.6 mainline was released on 15 December. This version includes four bugfixes, including one for a bug that was introduced in the previous release, where a segmentation fault could have occurred when HTTPS was used.
• njs 0.5.0 was released on 1 December. This is the latest version of the JavaScript-based scripting language that can be used to extend nginx functionality.
• Apache Tomcat 7.0.107 was released on 23 November, followed by the releases of Tomcat 8.5.61, 9.0.41 and 10.0.0 (beta) on 8 December.
• OpenLiteSpeed 1.7.7 was released on 9 December.
• Microsoft has added new capabilities to its Azure Government cloud, expanded its Azure Government Secret cloud, and announced a new Azure Government Top Secret cloud to handle top secret classified data.

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In the November 2020 survey we received responses from 1,229,948,224 sites across 263,787,870 unique domains and 10,564,577 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 24.2 million sites and 115,000 computers, but a loss of 310,000 domains.

Apache now powers 28.9% of the world's top million websites, where its presence has grown by 6,431 sites since last month. This has increased its lead over its closest competitor, nginx, which lost 2,563 sites from the top million and is now 3.72 percentage points behind Apache's leading share.

nginx continues to dominate in terms of web-facing computers, where its total rose by 88,700 to 3.67 million (+2.48%) computers and its share has grown by 0.47 percentage points to 34.7%. Although Apache gained 24,400 computers this month, its own share has now fallen to less than a third.

nginx also maintains its lead in two other metrics, with a total of 414 million sites (33.7% share) and 79.8 million domains (30.3%), while Apache still has the largest share of active sites (25.9%).

The number of domains powered by Microsoft web server suffered another noticeable fall this month, dropping by 473,000 to 19.1 million (-2.41%), reducing its share to 7.25%. Some of this decline is still being driven by GoDaddy's parked domains being moved to OpenResty web servers.

More than 36 million unique domains are served by OpenResty, making it the third most commonly used server by that metric, and putting it over 15 million domains ahead of Cloudflare. OpenResty is a scalable web platform based on NGINX and LuaJIT, which is a just-in-time compiler for the Lua language.

Some of the most commonly visited websites powered by OpenResty include Tumblr, Firefox Monitor, Basecamp and a few adult video sites. The 36.6 million domains powered by OpenResty are served from just 81,900 computers.

Other vendor and hosting news

• nginx 1.19.5 mainline was released on 24 November.
• NGINX Unit 1.21.0 was released on 19 November.
• Apache Tomcat 7.0.107, 8.5.60, 9.0.40 and 10.0.0.M10 were released on 17 November.
• OpenLiteSpeed 1.7.6 was released on 9 November, followed by OpenLiteSpeed 1.6.18 Stable on 24 November.
• Microsoft claims it will become the first major cloud provider to track hourly energy consumption and renewable energy matching in a commercial product using the Vattenfall 24/7 Matching solution for its new datacenter regions in Sweden, which will be available next year.
• DigitalOcean has introduced storage-optimized Droplets with NVMe SSDs, and reduced the price of its memory-optimized Droplets.
• Dozens of apps, websites and other online services including Coinbase, Flickr, Roku and The Washington Post were affected by an outage at Amazon's us-east-1 geographic region on 25 November.

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