In the November 2018 survey we received responses from 1,652,185,816 sites, 226,752,928 unique domains, and 8,048,899 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 21.3 million sites, but a gain of 1.7 million domains and 121 thousand web-facing computers.

The largest contributor to the increase in domains this month came from sites running on Microsoft server software, with an additional 1.18 million domains. The growth was concentrated at GoDaddy on domains running IIS 7.5.x, which took up 1.16 million of the increase. In addition to newly detected IIS domains, and a movement of some domains from nginx, many existing domains running previously unknown IIS versions also reported as IIS 7.5.x this month, resulting in the total number of domains for this version almost doubling to reach 12.7 million. This makes IIS 7.5.x the most common version seen by the survey, 2.7 million domains ahead of the newer 8.5.x version in second place, which first saw release in 2013. Despite the large gain in domains, Microsoft experienced losses in most other metrics, including a significant loss of 3.14 million active sites. Many of the domains gained at GoDaddy are likely to be holding pages, contributing only a small increase to the number of IIS active sites hosted at the company.

nginx experienced the largest loss in domains this month of 560 thousand, largely caused by a drop of just over 1 million domains at GoDaddy. Nginx has been experiencing a steady rise in market share by domains for many years, however this has now remained relatively static for the last 6-months at 23%. nginx remains just under 3 percentage points behind Microsoft’s 26% market share. Meanwhile though, nginx has continued to show strong growth in web-facing computers, with the largest increase this month of 51 thousand. Here its steady market share increases have shown no such pause, and it holds almost 28% of the market. Apache and Microsoft followed some way behind in web-facing computer gains, with increases of 13 thousand and 12 thousand, both experiencing small losses in market share as a result.

For more information see Active Sites