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.

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In the September 2020 survey we received responses from 1,196,298,727 sites, across 264,284,761 unique domains and 10,338,585 web-facing computers. Compared with last month, this is a loss of 34,277,859 sites and 10,901 web-facing computers, but a gain of 2,463,474 unique domains.

Approximately 15 million domains have switched from Microsoft web server software to OpenResty, a web server which adds LuaJIT support to nginx. This represents a 5.97 percentage point drop in Microsoft’s market share of domains, and, accordingly, a 6.71 percentage point increase for OpenResty. OpenResty now powers 34.5 million domains, giving it a 13% market share and gaining it third place behind nginx and Apache. This huge swing is driven by GoDaddy migrating its customers’ parked domains from GoDaddy’s own hosting infrastructure to Google Cloud.

Microsoft also experienced a large loss of 49,600 web-facing computers (-3.1%), unrelated to the GoDaddy OpenResty migration. The largest increase in web-facing computers was seen for Apache (+19,100), though this was not enough to re-take the lead from nginx, which became the largest web server vendor by this metric last month.

Most of the large vendors saw drops in terms of the number of active sites hosted this month. Cloudflare and LiteSpeed are among the vendors who saw growth in this area despite the overall negative trend. Pepyaka (used by Wix) and Squarespace also both gained active sites (+3.0% and +2.6% respectively), reflecting the growing popularity of website builders.

New vendor releases

This month LiteSpeed released version 5.4.9 of the LiteSpeed Web Server. A small number of new features have been added in this update, including automatic CloudFlare CDN IP detection and support for bcrypt password hashes when using HTTP authentication.

Apache have released three new versions of Tomcat this month – 8.5.58, 9.0.38 and 10.0.0-M8. These releases each add a number of new features and security patches. Notable changes include adding support for the Expect HTTP header, and adding support for setting read and write idle timeouts on websocket connections.

Apache also released version 8.1.0 of Apache Traffic Server. This release focused on improving the stability, reliability and performance of the server’s HTTP/2 support.

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In the August 2020 survey we received responses from 1,230,576,586 sites across 261,821,287 unique domains and 10,349,486 web-facing computers. This represents a loss of 3.65 million sites, but a gain of 1.16 million domains and 128,000 computers.

The number of web-facing computers using nginx increased by 83,000 this month, which means that - for the first time - nginx is in use by more web-facing computers than any other web server, including Apache. This is another milestone for nginx, and reflects its impressive growth in recent years.

Apache still serves more active sites than nginx, and a greater proportion of the top million busiest sites, but this month its decline in these metrics continued. One year ago, among the top million busiest sites, nginx trailed Apache’s market share by 6 percentage points. nginx has since halved this gap, and is now less than 3 percentage points behind. If the current trend continues, it won’t be long before nginx overtakes Apache in this area too.

As well as a marked decrease in total sites this month of 22.14 million (-15.8%), Microsoft also suffered in other metrics this month. The number of domains served using Microsoft software dropped by 8.27 million (-18.4%), and 19,000 fewer web-facing computers (-1.2%) are running Microsoft web servers. Microsoft also lost 633,000 active sites (-7.3%).

New vendor releases

Apache released three new versions of httpd this month. Version 2.4.44 fixed several bugs, version 2.4.45 dropped support for the abandoned HTTP2 Cache Digests proposal, and version 2.4.46 fixed three security vulnerabilities.

This month nginx released updates for three of its products. nginx 19.1.2 mainline was released on 11 August with a few minor optimizations and several bugfixes. On the same day, njs 0.4.3 was released, adding support for the querystring module. On 13 August nginx Unit 1.19.0 was released, which introduced several new features, improved performance, and fixed a number of bugs.

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In the July 2020 survey we received responses from 1,234,228,567 sites across 260,658,118 unique domains and 10,221,919 web-facing computers. This represents a gain of 9.47 million sites and 180,000 computers, but a loss of 1.75 million domains.

Most of the major server vendors saw gains in total sites this month: Apache gained 9.8 million sites after a loss of roughly the same size last month, while Microsoft and nginx gained 5.4 million and 2.5 million sites respectively. LiteSpeed continued to see strong growth, gaining 1.95 million new sites this month. Although it makes up 2.17% of the market, this represents strong growth from 1.62% at the start of the year.

nginx showed the highest growth in terms of domains, gaining 200,000. Losses of 1.1 million domains for Microsoft and 998,000 for Apache have further boosted nginx’s lead in this metric, and it now stands around 30 million domains ahead with a 29.8% (+0.27 pp) market share.

nginx also showed the highest growth in web-facing computers, with an increase of 97,000 taking its total to 3.5 million and leaving it just 9,000 computers (0.09 pp of market share) shy of Apache, the current leader. Apache has consistently had the highest number of web-facing computers since Netcraft began tracking the metric in 2007, but has slowly been losing market share – primarily to nginx. Microsoft trails in third position with a total of 1.6 million web-facing computers, around half that of nginx and Apache.

New vendor releases

LiteSpeed announced the first release candidate of LiteSpeed Web Server 6.0 on 17 July. This release brings several major new features such as support for conditionals in Apache configuration files, asynchronous execution of the mod_security Web Application Firewall, and sandboxed execution environments for PHP and CGI scripts. It also adds support for the latest HTTP/3 specification, draft 29. LiteSpeed has historically been fast to adopt new draft versions of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, often implementing support within a month of a new draft’s release.

nginx 1.19.1 mainline was announced on 7 July with a few minor changes and bugfixes – mainline being the release stream which receives new feature updates. Alongside this, nginx released version 0.4.2 of njs, a custom subset of JavaScript which allows nginx’s functionality to be extended. This release adds new regular expression and filesystem methods to the language, in addition to bugfixes.

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In the June 2020 survey we received responses from 1,224,760,416 sites across 262,406,750 unique domains and 10,042,047 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 1.21 million domains and 149,000 computers, but a loss of 13.3 million sites.

Microsoft lost the largest number of sites – more than 20 million – taking its total down by 13% to 135 million. This has decreased its market share by 1.51 percentage points to 11.0%. Apache also suffered a sizable loss of 10.7 million sites, decreasing its total to 304 million and taking its share down by 0.60 points to 24.8%.

nginx continues to lead with a total of 449 million sites, an increase of 2.95 million since last month. Coupled with the other major vendors' losses, this has increased nginx's market share by 0.63 points to 36.6%.

nginx also showed the largest computer growth, with 115,000 more computers taking its total up to 3.35 million and putting it only 76,000 computers away from Apache's leading total.

While nginx looks set to soon become the largest vendor in terms of computers – possibly even by next month – celebrations by F5 Networks are likely to be marred by the latest developments in the dispute over the ownership of the nginx web server source code: it is now being sued by Lynwood Investments, who claim it owns the software.

The latest move comes after police raids on the offices of nginx and the home of one of its co-founders, Igor Sysoev, in December 2019. Russian search engine and e-commerce service provider, Rambler, alleged the webserver was developed while Igor Sysoev was a Rambler employee. Rambler transferred the rights to pursue the dispute to Lynwood Investments.

Meanwhile, nginx has also extended its recent new lead in the domains metric, with it now being used to host sites across 1.82 million more domains than last month.

Google was the only major vendor to gain active sites this month – a 2.12% increase to 19.3 million – and LiteSpeed was the only one to increase its presence among the top million websites, where it now has a share of 1.92%.

New vendor releases

nginx 1.19.0 mainline was announced on 26 May. This first release in the 1.19.* stream adds client certificate validation with OCSP, as well as a few bug fixes. The latest stable version is still 1.18.0, which was released in April. The difference between these two release streams is that the mainline branch is where new features are added, while the stable branches receive only security and bug fixes. This gives the stable releases a fixed feature set, which increases compatibility with third-party modules.

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In the May 2020 survey we received responses from 1,238,024,212 sites across 261,192,350 unique domains and 9,892,834 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 224,000 computers and 1.10 million domains, but a loss of 8.10 million sites.

nginx lost the greatest number of sites, with 14.2 million fewer than in April, but conversely had by far the greatest increases in unique domain names (+1.50 million, +2.02%), and web-facing computers (+137,000, +4.43%) this month. OpenResty, which is based on nginx, also saw a large 237,000 domain count increase to reach 7.15 million – the second largest increase in domains for any vendor this month.

Apache had losses in most metrics, dropping 244,000 domains. It did, however, come away with 6.88 million more sites and 45,000 more computers this month than last. Apache still leads in the active sites, computers, and top one million sites metrics.

Microsoft lost out on all metrics this month, dropping by 5.08 million sites and 175,000 unique domains. Both Apache and Microsoft have been on slow long-term downward trends in most metrics. Although they have both increased their count of web-facing computers over time, nginx has seen much stronger growth in comparison. Despite running on a 17.9% share of domain names and 16.4% share of computers, Microsoft holds a much smaller 4.72% share of active sites.

LiteSpeed currently serves 4.20 million domains, giving it a 1.61% market share. It has a slightly higher 1.88% share amongst the top one million sites. LiteSpeed has seen consistent growth, and has had a 23.3% domain count growth over the last 12 months.

Vendor News

Nginx released a new stable version of the nginx web server. nginx version 1.18.0 incorporates additional features which have been introduced in the mainline 1.17.x nginx versions over time. Nginx also released version 1.17.0 of the Nginx Unit application server.

LiteSpeed released new 1.6.13 and 1.7.1 versions of their OpenLiteSpeed web server, introducing bug fixes, security features, updates from their LSQUIC library, CentOS 8 support, and more.

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