In the October 2020 survey we received responses from 1,205,797,275 sites across 264,098,084 unique domains and 10,449,223 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 9.50 million hostnames and 111,000 computers, but a loss of 187,000 domains.
nginx experienced the largest growth in domains and web-facing computers, where it leads with a total of 79.9 million domains and 3.58 million computers, giving it shares of 30.2% and 34.2%. However, nginx’s growth was beaten by Google in terms of active sites, with Google gaining 1.31 million active sites compared to nginx’s gain of 1.06 million. This growth makes Google the only major vendor to see an increase in its market share of active sites this month, which now stands just above 10%. Despite falling by 0.79 percentage points, Apache remains well in the lead with a 25.7% share of active sites.
Contrary to its strong growth in other metrics, nginx saw the largest drop in its presence among the top million websites, with 3,030 fewer sites taking its share down to 25.5% while Apache continues to lead with 28.3%.
Other notable changes this month include an 8.10% reduction in the number of domains powered by Microsoft web servers, which fell by 1.73 million to 19.6 million. Much of this was caused by the continuation of parked GoDaddy domains migrating from GoDaddy’s own hosting infrastructure to OpenResty servers in Google Cloud, resulting in the number of OpenResty-powered domains rising by 1.92 million to 36.4 million. The only market in which Microsoft increased its share was within the top million websites, where it gained 319 additional sites to reach a share of 7.20%.
DigitalOcean App Platform
DigitalOcean has entered the Platform as a Service (PaaS) arena by launching its new App Platform product, which can be used to build, deploy and scale web applications and static websites. It is a fully managed service based on DigitalOcean Kubernetes and other open standards, offering much of the flexibility of Kubernetes without the associated complexity.
Competing with the likes of AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Oracle Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure App Service, DigitalOcean App Platform offers a Starter pricing tier that lets customers become familiar with the platform by deploying up to three static sites free of charge, while dynamic apps can be built and deployed from $5/month. App Platform supports several popular languages and application frameworks out of the box, including PHP, Docker, Go, Node.js, Python and Ruby.
All pricing tiers – including the free one – include global content delivery via Cloudflare, which means that applications deployed on App Platform will likely count towards the number of Cloudflare-hosted websites in future Netcraft surveys.
New server releases
nginx 1.19.3 was released on 29 September. This version in the mainline release branch incorporates several bug fixes, some new directives, and a new ngx_stream_set_module, which allows variables to be set in nginx configuration files.
njs 0.4.4 was also released on 29 September. This version of the nginx-extending scripting language includes a new Buffer object as well as several other new features and bug fixes. NGINX Unit 1.20.0 was later released on 8 October, and introduces several new features, bug fixes, and support for ASGI 3.0.
Apache Tomcat 8.5.59, Tomcat 9.0.39 and Tomcat 10.0.0-M9 were released on 9 October. Tomcat 10.0.0-M9 is considered a milestone release, as it switches from Java EE to Jakarta EE following the transfer of Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. Apache has provided a tool that automatically converts existing Java EE 8 projects that run on Tomcat 9 to Jakarta EE 9 projects that will run on this latest version of Tomcat 10.
| Developer | September 2020 | Percent | October 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 407,086,442 | 34.03% | 412,851,940 | 34.24% | 0.21 |
| Apache | 330,682,809 | 27.64% | 326,050,973 | 27.04% | -0.60 |
| Microsoft | 95,944,600 | 8.02% | 92,405,675 | 7.66% | -0.36 |
| 45,689,961 | 3.82% | 46,583,411 | 3.86% | 0.04 |
| Developer | September 2020 | Percent | October 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 50,925,159 | 26.46% | 50,837,005 | 25.66% | -0.79 |
| nginx | 37,549,911 | 19.51% | 38,606,507 | 19.49% | -0.02 |
| 18,663,687 | 9.70% | 19,978,491 | 10.08% | 0.39 | |
| Microsoft | 7,861,906 | 4.08% | 7,716,026 | 3.89% | -0.19 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | September 2020 | Percent | October 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 280,949 | 28.09% | 282,798 | 28.28% | 0.18 |
| nginx | 257,562 | 25.76% | 254,530 | 25.45% | -0.30 |
| Microsoft | 71,664 | 7.17% | 71,983 | 7.20% | 0.03 |
| LiteSpeed | 21,341 | 2.13% | 22,199 | 2.22% | 0.09 |
| Developer | September 2020 | Percent | October 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 3,531,550 | 34.16% | 3,577,128 | 34.23% | 0.07 |
| Apache | 3,493,422 | 33.79% | 3,490,546 | 33.40% | -0.39 |
| Microsoft | 1,535,962 | 14.86% | 1,543,860 | 14.77% | -0.08 |
| Developer | September 2020 | Percent | October 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 79,534,471 | 30.09% | 79,895,960 | 30.25% | 0.16 |
| Apache | 70,646,497 | 26.73% | 69,649,769 | 26.37% | -0.36 |
| Microsoft | 21,331,946 | 8.07% | 19,604,847 | 7.42% | -0.65 |
| 2,387,975 | 0.90% | 2,436,537 | 0.92% | 0.02 |