In the November 2015 survey we received responses from 902,997,800 sites and 5,539,129 web-facing computers. This reflects a monthly gain of 24.7 million sites, and 47,200 computers.

This month's website growth was dominated by Apache, which gained nearly 31 million sites – more than eight times as many as nginx, which had the second largest growth amongst the top three. Helped by a loss of 22 million Microsoft-powered websites, Apache's market share has increased to 37%, with its lead over Microsoft more than doubling to 9.9 percentage points.

This sizeable shift in market shares can be mostly attributed to 17 million websites whose domain names became due for renewal. This caused them to be moved from IIS servers to a set of domain holding pages hosted on Apache servers.

Despite Apache also having the greatest growth in web-facing computers this month, with an increase of 23,405 computers, its market share grew by just 0.03 percentage points. In contrast, nginx's similar growth of 21,004 computers increased its market share by 0.27 percentage points.

The number of web-facing computers using each vendor's software serves as a more stable metric, due in part to the cost of provisioning machines. Conversely, website counts are more prone to large fluctuations, as a single computer can serve countless websites at little incremental cost.

Demonstrating this disconnect, Tengine – an nginx fork developed by Alibaba – made a significant contribution to the overall growth in hostnames despite being used on only 5,100 web-facing computers. While the number of sites using this server grew by nearly 30%, rising to 42 million, the number of active sites using Tengine actually fell by 5%.

nginx continues to increase its presence amongst the top million sites. It now powers an additional 2,708 of the top sites, with Apache, Microsoft and Google each losing out to make room. nginx also showed the largest active sites growth in November, growing by 1.6 million (+6.2%) to reach a total of 27.9 million.

Since the launch of Yunjiasu ("fast cloud") in December 2014, more than 2.5 million sites (and 108,000 active sites) are now being served by a modified version of nginx called yunjiasu-nginx, making it the 10th most commonly used web server software by hostnames. Most of this growth has taken place in the last few months, with the total number of sites using this server growing by more than 5x since August.

Yunjiasu is operated by Chinese search engine giant Baidu, in collaboration with CloudFlare, who are responsible for the similar cloudflare-nginx server that is currently used by more than 5 million sites. Baidu's Yunjiasu offers the same features and functionality as CloudFlare (CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, etc.), but it is optimised for performance and regulatory controls within China.

By combining Baidu's network of 17 mainland China data centers with CloudFlare's 47 data centers outside of China, it is possible to start addressing some of the performance issues that have been dampening the appeal of Chinese hosting companies. For example, the largest hosting company in China, Aliyun, only allows its customers to host websites within China, and although it provides its own CDN service, all of the nodes are also within China. Websites that are hosted in China, and available across the combined CloudFlare/Baidu network, will benefit from much greater availability and faster load times from outside of China. Symmetrically, websites that are hosted outside of China will load faster and become much more available within China.

One of the first customers to be served across Baidu's network was TechCrunch, whose local Chinese edition (techcrunch.cn) was previously only available about 50% of the time within mainland China. CloudFlare claims that it now achieves nearly 100% availability, with an average page load time of 2.5 seconds rather than 17. CloudFlare customers must explicitly opt in to enjoy the performance benefits of the China network: To overcome technical, economic and regulatory issues, Baidu operates all services within China, while CloudFlare operates all of those outside, and by default, no CloudFlare customer traffic will pass through the China network.

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