In the July 2016 survey we received responses from 1,073,777,722 sites and 6,058,513 web-facing computers. This reflects an increase of 28 million sites and 107,000 computers.

Microsoft and Apache continue to fluctuate between 1st and 2nd places for total number of websites, with Microsoft retaking the lead again this month after an increase of 36 million sites, and the loss of 20 million Apache sites. However, it is only in the hostnames metric that Microsoft leads, with Apache coming out on top by a considerable margin in all other areas - active sites, domains, IP addresses and web-facing computers.

Looking at the number of active sites, a more stable metric created by Netcraft to ignore automatically generated bulk content, Apache leads with a 46.4% market share. nginx is the second most popular vendor, with a 21.8% market share, and is the only major vendor to consistently gain share in recent months. A similar percentage of both Apache’s and nginx’s sites are deemed to be active, 23.7% of Apache sites and 22.1% for nginx. In comparison, only 4.5% of sites using Microsoft server software are considered active, leaving Microsoft in 3rd place by this active sites metric with a 9.8% market share.

Apache, Microsoft and nginx all gained web-facing computers this month; however, nginx once again saw the only increase in market share. nginx gained 46,000 computers, a growth of 4.8% on last month, and now stands just shy of 1 million web-facing computers. Apache and Microsoft gained 31,000 and 11,000 computers.

nginx also continues to gain market share among the top million busiest websites, where it is now used by 27.9% of sites. Apache, while still holding a dominant position, continues to slowly lose market share, falling 0.55 percentage points to 43.2%.

For more information see Active Sites