In the November 2018 survey we received responses from 1,652,185,816 sites, 226,752,928 unique domains, and 8,048,899 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 21.3 million sites, but a gain of 1.7 million domains and 121 thousand web-facing computers.

The largest contributor to the increase in domains this month came from sites running on Microsoft server software, with an additional 1.18 million domains. The growth was concentrated at GoDaddy on domains running IIS 7.5.x, which took up 1.16 million of the increase. In addition to newly detected IIS domains, and a movement of some domains from nginx, many existing domains running previously unknown IIS versions also reported as IIS 7.5.x this month, resulting in the total number of domains for this version almost doubling to reach 12.7 million. This makes IIS 7.5.x the most common version seen by the survey, 2.7 million domains ahead of the newer 8.5.x version in second place, which first saw release in 2013. Despite the large gain in domains, Microsoft experienced losses in most other metrics, including a significant loss of 3.14 million active sites. Many of the domains gained at GoDaddy are likely to be holding pages, contributing only a small increase to the number of IIS active sites hosted at the company.

nginx experienced the largest loss in domains this month of 560 thousand, largely caused by a drop of just over 1 million domains at GoDaddy. Nginx has been experiencing a steady rise in market share by domains for many years, however this has now remained relatively static for the last 6-months at 23%. nginx remains just under 3 percentage points behind Microsoft’s 26% market share. Meanwhile though, nginx has continued to show strong growth in web-facing computers, with the largest increase this month of 51 thousand. Here its steady market share increases have shown no such pause, and it holds almost 28% of the market. Apache and Microsoft followed some way behind in web-facing computer gains, with increases of 13 thousand and 12 thousand, both experiencing small losses in market share as a result.

In the October 2018 survey we received responses from 1,673,535,333 sites, 225,042,277 unique domains, and 7,927,795 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 31 million sites, 2.4 million domains and 142 thousand web-facing computers.

Nginx contributed the majority of this month's growth in terms of both domains and web-facing computers. Over 1.6 million additional domains were running nginx this month, taking its total up to 52 million. Combined with a loss of 444 thousand domains using Microsoft web server software, nginx now stands only 5 million domains behind Microsoft's second place spot. Apache remains in the lead, a further 18 million domains ahead. Despite regular gains in absolute numbers, including an increase of 200 thousand this month, Apache is continuing to experience a steady decline in market share. In terms of web-facing computers, nginx's gain of 70 thousand was almost twice that of Apache and Microsoft combined, which increased by 19 thousand and 16 thousand computers respectively.

Apache's active sites market share took a large hit this month, dropping over 8 percentage points down to 30%. The loss of 13 million active sites was concentrated at the Skyrock blogging platform, where sites stopped including a server banner for HTTP requests this month, meaning they are included in the "Other" category. However, the HTTPS version of these sites still appear to be running on Apache web servers returning 'Server: Apache' headers.

OpenResty gained 160 thousand domains (+6%), ratcheting up its total to 3 million, overtaking LiteSpeed at 2.9 million domains and becoming the fifth largest web server by number of domains. The OpenResty web platform integrates the standard nginx core with a LuaJIT compiler and a number of Lua libraries and third-party modules to run powerful web applications within the web server itself.

Netcraft's Web Server Survey continues to see strong growth among many of the new gTLDs. The .app and .icu gTLDs have shown the greatest gains among new TLDs launching in the last 6-months. The number of domains responding in this month's survey increased by 11 thousand since September for Google's .app domain, to over 236 thousand domains. Registrations for .icu domains (short for "I See You") increased by 10 thousand since September, a 30% increase to 42 thousand domains. This growth for .icu has also seen the number of active sites more than double, to just over 6 thousand.

In the September 2018 survey we received responses from 1,642,339,233 sites, 222,628,534 unique domains, and 7,785,976 web-facing computers. This reflects gains of 1.1 million unique domains and 28,000 web-facing computers, but a loss of 19 million sites.

Despite the overall increase in number of unique domains this month, all of the major web server vendors experienced losses. The largest gains in September came from lesser known server software — Pepyaka increased by just over 2 million domains, and DPS increased by 893k domains — with both returning to previously seen usage levels after a couple of months of near absence from the survey.

DPS (Data Protection Server), currently the 11th largest server by domains, is used exclusively by GoDaddy to host customer sites that have been created with its Website Builder tool. Last month saw a temporary swing on a single GoDaddy IP Address from DPS to Microsoft, accounting for both last month's Microsoft gains, and this month's loss.

Pepyaka, now the 7th largest server by domains, was last seen in the survey in large volumes in June 2018, being primarily used by Wix web development platform on Amazon AWS infrastructure. Wix has been a long-time user of nginx, and originally moved all user traffic to the commercial NGINX Plus product to future-proof its load balancing needs. The version numbering used by Pepyaka (currently 1.13.10) combined with Wix's previous usage of nginx suggests that it could be based on the March 2018 mainline version of nginx. The loss of Pepyaka from the survey two months ago coincided with Wix moving its customers' sites from Amazon to Cogent Communications. The return of Pepyaka in the September survey coincides with a similar movement of its customers' sites from Cogent Communications to a combination of Wix's own and Google's infrastructure.

In the web-facing computer market, nginx was the only major web server vendor to experience a gain this month, with an increase of over 41,000 (+2%). Unusually both Apache and Microsoft saw a small loss in absolute numbers of web-facing computers this month, dropping 4,900 and 9,500, in addition to their on-going gradual declines in market share. This has resulted in nginx's market share rising to 27.0%.