In the October 2016 survey we received responses from 1,429,331,486 sites and 6,144,093 web-facing computers. This reflects a large increase of 144 million sites, and a more modest increase of 25,300 computers.

Microsoft once again saw the largest increase of web sites this month, gaining 95 million. Apache and nginx made up the majority of the remainder of web site growth, gaining 25 million and 11 million. Despite Microsoft’s large gain of web sites, it lost both web-facing computers (-17,700) and active sites (-1.2 million).

Apache saw the largest increase of active sites this month, gaining 1.8 million, while nginx gained 400,000, the second largest growth. These gains, coupled with Microsoft’s loss of 1.2 million active sites, led to Microsoft’s share of active sites dropping to 9.27%, the first time that it has fallen below 10%. Apache increased its market share by 0.19 percentage points and continues to dominate, now with 46.30% of the active sites.

The largest increase of web-facing computers was made by nginx, gaining 20,000. Despite now having more than twice as many active sites as Microsoft, nginx remains in third place by number of web-facing computers with 17.41% of the market, compared to Microsoft’s 24.91%. Apache leads, running on 45.97% of all web-facing computers, however, both Apache and Microsoft are gradually losing market share to nginx.

Within the million busiest sites, the long-term trend is the ascent of nginx, at the expense of both Apache and Microsoft. This month continues that trend, with Apache losing 0.13 percentage points, Microsoft losing 0.14, and nginx gaining 0.20. However, Apache still leads by a significant margin over second-placed nginx, with 146,000 more of the million busiest sites using Apache.

For more information see Active Sites