In the July 2017 survey we received responses from 1,767,964,429 sites and 6,593,508 web-facing computers. This represents a small gain of 1.0 million sites (+0.06%) and 71,000 computers (+1.1%).

nginx growth unfaltering

A further 52,000 (+3.84%) web-facing computers were found running nginx this month, which has brought its market share up to 21.4%. It is currently the third-largest server vendor in terms of web-facing computers, but it is now only 122,000 computers away from Microsoft. With no reason to suspect that its consistently strong growth could falter soon, it is likely to take second place from Microsoft later this year.

Originally developed to solve the C10k problem, nginx has seen phenomenal growth in web-facing computers.

nginx's market share growth was also assisted by Microsoft's loss of 6,400 computers, while Apache's gain of 7,500 computers was not enough to stop its own share falling by 0.35 percentage points. Apache is still far in the lead, though – more than 2.8 million web-facing computers currently run various versions and derivatives of the Apache httpd, giving it a 42.8% share of all web-facing computers.

Microsoft now serves more than half of all sites

In terms of hostnames, Microsoft gained 78 million sites, while Apache lost 56 million. This large shift has given Microsoft more than half of the market for the first time ever – 53.2% of all hostnames – with nearly three times as many sites as Apache has.

This marks a complete role reversal from four years ago, when Apache held 52% of the market while Microsoft had just 19.7%. That was the last time more than half of the world's websites used Apache. However, the hostnames metric is volatile, being susceptible to large swathes of automatically generated sites served from relatively few computers. These types of site are not counted in Netcraft's active sites survey, which paints a very different picture: Apache has more than six times as many active sites as Microsoft, and more than twice as many as nginx.

Notably, Apache has always held the largest share of the active sites market ever since the metric was included in our surveys in 2000. While Microsoft came within 10 percentage points of Apache's share on a few occasions last decade, it is now a long way off with only a 7.48% share, compared with Apache's share of 45.2%.

Apache 2.2 reaches end of life

Apache 2.4.27 was released on 11 July, along with Apache 2.2.34, which will be the final release in the 2.2.x legacy branch. Security patches for Apache 2.2.34 may be made available until December 2017, but no further maintenance patches or releases are anticipated.

To remain secure, sites still using Apache 2.2 will need to migrate to Apache 2.4 fairly swiftly. While it is difficult to tell exactly how many sites are running soon-to-be unsupported versions of Apache 2.2, at least 72 million sites claim to be using Apache 2.2 in their Server headers. The majority of these sites are hosted in the United States.

On the same day as the Apache releases, nginx 1.12.1 stable and nginx 1.13.3 mainline were released, with both including a simple fix for an integer overflow vulnerability in nginx's range filter module.

Not to be outdone, version 2.0.0 of Microsoft's IIS Administration API was also released in July, little more than two months after 1.1.0 hit general availability. The API is intended to make it easier to manage Microsoft IIS web servers, and the new version includes a range of "under the hood" improvements that make it easier to install and configure. The Microsoft IIS team also released a new version of URL Rewrite and made several improvements to its browser-based management portal at manage.iis.net during June.

In the June 2017 survey we received responses from 1,766,926,408 sites and 6,522,692 web-facing computers. This represents a loss of 48 million websites, although the total number of computers has grown by 118,000 (+1.8%).

All of the top three vendors lost sites in this month's survey, but all showed gains in web-facing computers. Many of the sites that disappeared were spam sites that used the .cn (China) top-level domain. Microsoft lost the largest number of sites – nearly 28 million – while Apache lost 8.9 million and nginx lost 5.4 million.

Apache still leads the market in terms of web-facing computers, but its share fell by 0.28 points to 43.1% despite gaining 33,200 additional computers. Apache also continues to lead the active sites market, and with net growth of 1.2 million active sites this month, its share has increased to 45.9%.

nginx gained the largest number of web-facing computers, increasing its total by 54,200 to 1.36 million (+4.2%), and taking its market share of computers up by 0.46 percentage points to 20.8%. It is now less than 3 percentage points behind Microsoft's share.

nginx is also still increasing its presence amongst the top million websites. This month it gained 939 top sites, in contrast to the losses felt by Apache and Microsoft, which saw 2,970 and 692 sites depart from the top million. Some of the lesser-used servers that also increased their presence in the top million included openresty, Varnish and Tengine.

Google overtakes Microsoft in active sites

Notably, Google has overtaken Microsoft in active sites – it now has 13.3 million, compared with Microsoft's 13.2 million. This gives Google a 7.8% share of the active sites market, although its share of all sites is only 1.1%.

Netcraft first started tracking Google's custom web server software as a major vendor group 10 years ago, when it was used by 2.7 million sites. Google's servers were originally grouped under Apache, as they were based on open source Apache code, but the amount of customisation warranted making a new group – and no doubt even more changes have taken place over the past 10 years. Today, there are over 20 million Google sites, around two-thirds of which are considered active. This is a much higher ratio than most other vendors see – for example, only 1.5% of the 862 million sites using Microsoft's web server software are deemed active.

The most commonly seen Google web server is GSE (Google Servlet Engine), which is used by millions of Blogger sites that use blogspot domains (e.g. funny-cats.blogspot.com and catversushuman.blogspot.ca), and also by many Blogger-powered sites that use custom domain names. GSE is also used by sites under the googledrive.com and googlegroups.com domains, along with some other Google services such as Gmail, although none has the volume of hostnames seen at Blogger.

Another Google web server is Google Frontend, which is used by hundreds of thousands of sites, including App Engine sites hosted under the appspot.com domain. This server was much more prominent in the past, as it was also used by Blogger sites before they switched to GSE. Back then, Google Frontend sites also used an acronym in their HTTP response headers (Server: GFE), but Google Frontend sites now return the full name of the server software, i.e. Server: Google Frontend.

Google Frontend is also used to serve some of Google's legacy sites and deprecated services, such as the former social networking site at jaiku.com. This was shut down by Google in 2012, and all pages on the site now use Google Frontend to serve error pages.

Another Google server – ghs – is responsible for redirecting traffic from googlepages.com sites that were created with Google Page Creator. This website creation service was shut down in 2009, but existing pages were migrated to Google Sites, which hosts user content in subdirectories under the sites.google.com hostname. When a browser visits a legacy hostname like sunsetpizza.googlepages.com, ghs will redirect the user to its new location at https://sites.google.com/site/sunsetpizza/.

Other Server headers used more sparingly by Google-hosted services include UploadServer, sffe, ESF (used by Google Docs), and gws.