November 2017 Web Server Survey
21st November, 2017
In the November 2017 survey we received responses from 1,819,412,110 sites and 6,893,323 web-facing computers, reflecting a gain of 4.17M sites and 6,961 computers.
This month’s web server survey saw Microsoft’s market share amongst all sites fall by 12.64 percentage points due to a loss of 228M sites. Despite this, Microsoft still retains its place with the largest market share by this metric of 36.80%, with Apache trailing at 24.38%. The majority of the loss occurred at just one hosting provider where over 190M Microsoft sites were lost.
This change isn’t reflected in the active sites metric which only saw minor changes amongst the main web server vendors. Microsoft lost only 0.03 percentage points of its market share with a drop of 261k active sites. Apache leads in the active sites metric by a considerable margin, increasing its share slightly this month to 44.55%.
Amongst the top million busiest sites Microsoft experienced a small increase in market share, pausing its general decline in this market. nginx experienced the largest growth with an increase of 2,133 of the top million sites.
nginx also saw the largest increase in number of web-facing computers, gaining 25k and pulling 1 percentage point of market share clear of Microsoft, which it overtook last month. Apache also experienced a gain in computers, albeit smaller at just 7k. It remains considerably ahead with a 42.38% market share.
New gTLDs Seen for the First Time
This month the controversial new .search gTLD being run by Google’s Charleston Road Registry subsidiary was found for the first time, with www.nic.search responding to the survey. Google hopes it will be able to run .search as a dotless domain which will automatically redirect users to their search engine of choice. This proposal has been criticised for going against ICANN’s own rules, which prohibits this functionality due to the potential for conflicts with existing names on internal networks. This feature could also cause confusion for users who have come to expect that typing words into their address bar will perform a search query for that term.
It is currently uncertain whether or not Google will be allowed to run the .search TLD as a dotless domain, however with the launch of the first site on this TLD this month Google is one step closer to the provision of this service.
| Developer | October 2017 | Percent | November 2017 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | 897,467,517 | 49.44% | 669,517,177 | 36.80% | -12.64 |
| Apache | 340,811,235 | 18.78% | 443,521,995 | 24.38% | 5.60 |
| nginx | 333,942,604 | 18.40% | 367,687,489 | 20.21% | 1.81 |
| 21,127,078 | 1.16% | 20,333,604 | 1.12% | -0.05 |
| Developer | October 2017 | Percent | November 2017 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 76,631,591 | 44.50% | 75,458,690 | 44.55% | 0.05 |
| nginx | 36,581,250 | 21.24% | 35,879,527 | 21.18% | -0.06 |
| 13,592,197 | 7.89% | 13,584,544 | 8.02% | 0.13 | |
| Microsoft | 12,544,124 | 7.28% | 12,283,448 | 7.25% | -0.03 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | October 2017 | Percent | November 2017 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 386,464 | 38.65% | 383,964 | 38.40% | -0.25 |
| nginx | 294,290 | 29.43% | 296,423 | 29.64% | 0.21 |
| Microsoft | 96,507 | 9.65% | 97,874 | 9.79% | 0.14 |
| 16,239 | 1.62% | 14,334 | 1.43% | -0.19 |
| Developer | October 2017 | Percent | November 2017 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 2,915,306 | 42.33% | 2,922,396 | 42.39% | 0.06 |
| nginx | 1,553,400 | 22.56% | 1,578,526 | 22.90% | 0.34 |
| Microsoft | 1,526,921 | 22.17% | 1,509,127 | 21.89% | -0.28 |