In the April 2017 survey we received responses from 1,816,416,499 sites and 6,320,910 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 56 million sites and 49,800 computers.

Microsoft had a noticeable gain of 108 million sites (+15.4%), recouping last month's loss and expanding its market share by nearly 5 percentage points to 44.7%. Microsoft is 10 million sites down from the start of the year, but its share is now nearly twice as large as Apache's. The only major vendor to suffer a loss of hostnames in April was nginx, which lost 1.4 million sites – this took its market share down by 0.41 points to 19.2%, leaving it slightly further behind Apache's share of 22.7%.

Despite nginx's loss of sites, it was once again the only major vendor to increase its presence within the top million sites, increasing its count by 2,164 sites, while Apache lost 1,962; but Apache stays in the lead with a 40.9% share, while nginx's increased to 28.7%.

nginx's growth is also reflected well in the web-facing computers market, where it had the largest increase of 29,900 computers (+2.44%). This took its share up by 0.32 points to 19.9%, while Apache's leading share fell by 0.27 points to 43.5%. Microsoft is still in second place with 24.2% of the web-facing computer market, but this position looks set to be taken by nginx within the next year if the trend of nginx's gains and Microsoft's losses continue.

Apache continues to reign supreme in terms of active sites, where it increased its market share slightly to 46.3%, putting it further ahead of nginx, which has a share of 19.6%; however, the long term trend over the past several years has seen the two vendors getting closer, with nginx slowly gaining market share while Apache has slowly declined. Microsoft's share of active sites is only 8.28%, but this is enough to keep it in third place, ahead of Google.

A new mainline version of nginx (1.11.13) was released on 4 April. This release included several bugfixes and formed the basis of the current stable version, nginx 1.12.0, which was later released on 12 April. As a consequence of including all bug fixes and new features from the entire 1.11.x branch, nginx 1.12.0 includes support for configuring multiple SSL certificates of different types, better support for dynamic modules, and several other new features.

Earlier this month, Netcraft examined the success of ICANN's New gTLD program, as well as the impact it has had on brand owners such as LEGO. The .loan gTLD saw the largest domain growth of any type of TLD this month, gaining 287,000 unique domains, yet losing more than 10 million websites. Only 3% of all .loan domains are considered active by Netcraft, indicating that large numbers share near-identical content, such as monetized domain holding pages.

From the TLD operator's perspective, the rise in .loan domains is much more significant than the large reduction in sites, as each unique domain will correspond to a domain registration, which invariably involves some type of transaction. The cost of registering a single .loan domain can vary between $20-$40 per year (including ICANN fees), depending which registrar is used, although some registrars – such as Namecheap – offer low introductory prices of $0.88 for the first year only. The prevalence of domain holding pages suggests that many of these domains may have been bought at introductory prices, so the estimated revenue from the 980,000 unique .loan domains currently in use on the web is likely to be much closer to $1m than $40m.

In the March 2017 survey we received responses from 1,760,630,795 sites and 6,271,146 computers, reflecting a loss of 31 million sites, but a gain of 34,000 computers.

nginx was the only major web server vendor to increase its market shares in all four metrics this month. Its share of websites grew by 0.49 percentage points, reaching nearly 20%, and its share of web-facing computers grew by 0.39 p.p. to 19.6%. The latter gain was driven by a 31,000 growth in the number of computers running nginx, which was by far the largest computer growth in the survey.

Microsoft suffered the largest loss in March, falling by 70 million sites and taking its share down by more than 3 percentage points. This drop paved the way for Apache to claw back 0.91 points with its gain of 9.4 million sites. Microsoft's market share of sites now stands just below 40%, though this remains nearly as much as Apache and nginx combined.

Microsoft also suffered the largest and only loss of active sites among the major vendors, reducing its total count of active sites by 421,000. Microsoft's active sites share is now less than 9%, far behind nginx's share of 19.7% and Apache's 45.8%.

nginx was the only major vendor to increase its presence within the top million sites, increasing its count by 1,592, while Apache lost 3,502 and Microsoft lost 746.

Microsoft web servers

Among the 704 million sites that are powered by Microsoft web server software, Windows Server 2008 is still the most commonly used platform. The original version of this operating system shipped with Microsoft IIS 7.0 as its web server, while the subsequent Windows Server 2008 R2 release included IIS 7.5. More than half a billion websites are hosted on Windows Server 2008 computers (including R2), which accounts for 72% of all Windows-hosted websites.

Although its R2 version was released more than 7 years ago, Windows Server 2008 is likely to remain prevalent for several more years. Last year's launch of the Windows Server Premium Assurance program allows customers to extend Windows Server 2008's support period from 10 to 16 years, giving access to security updates (as well as "critical" and "important" bulletins) until January 2026.

A further 185 million sites are still running on Windows Server 2003 computers, which are not covered by the Windows Server Premium Assurance program. The extended support period for Windows Server 2003 ended on July 14, 2015, so unless site operators have a special agreement in place, Microsoft will no longer be issuing security updates for any version of Windows Server 2003. US-CERT warned that these unsupported installations of Windows Server 2003 are exposed to an elevated risk of cybersecurity dangers, such as malicious attacks or electronic data loss.

Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows Server 2016, may still seem in its infancy, but it is now starting to show promising growth. 80,200 sites are now being served from Windows Server 2016 machines, which is nearly 20,000 more than last month. The number of web-facing computers running Windows Server 2016 also grew by 2,509, while Windows Server 2008 lost 2,316.

Windows Server 2016's computer growth was outpaced only by Window Server 2012, which gained 7,100 computers this month. Windows Server 2012 now accounts for 463,000 web-facing computers, which is nearly half as many as Windows Server 2008, but it is used to host far fewer websites – just 22 million compared with the 535 million sites hosted on Windows Server 2008 computers.

In the February 2017 survey we received responses from 1,792,104,054 sites and 6,236,791 web-facing computers, reflecting a loss of 7.9 million sites and 91,200 computers.

nginx gains sites and computers

nginx had the largest growth of both sites and web-facing computers amongst the major vendors this month, enjoying a gain of 31 million sites and 13,400 computers, while hefty losses by Microsoft and Apache led to the overall losses seen in this month’s survey. Microsoft lost 48 million sites and 9,900 computers, while Apache lost 13 million sites and 85,700 computers.

Much of the loss of web-facing computers using Apache is the result of declining numbers of Western Digital My Cloud personal storage devices being found in Netcraft's survey. These devices allowed consumers to access their files remotely using public hostnames under the wd2go.com domain. This disappearing act might have been influenced by the three My Cloud firmware updates that were released in December – the first of these changed how files are accessed from the My Cloud web and mobile apps, and the other two resolved a security vulnerability related to remote access.

Despite suffering the largest loss, Microsoft web servers power 43.2% of all sites on the internet, more than twice Apache's share. Meanwhile, nginx's growth has increased its own count to 348 million, bringing it to within striking distance of Apache. This highlights a dramatic change in fortunes for Apache, which was comfortably in first place a year ago, but is now under threat of falling into third place.

In terms of web-facing computers, Apache continues to fare well. While its 3% decline is significant in the space of a month, Apache's 2.7 million computers still give it the lion's share of the market (44.1%). This is followed by Microsoft's 1.5 million computers (24.7%), and nginx's 1.2 million (19.2%).

nginx was also the only major vendor to make a gain within the top million busiest sites. Its share grew slightly to 28.34%, while Apache suffered the largest loss of 0.21 percentage points, taking its share down to 41.41%, though Apache maintained its first-place position with a lead of 13.1 percentage points over nginx.

Apache still strong in active sites

Despite its losses elsewhere, Apache gained 887,000 active sites this month. nginx made the second largest gain, with an increase of 757,000 active sites. The active sites metric is more appropriate for some applications, as it counts websites but excludes those that contain automatically generated content such as domain holding pages.

Apache also has the largest share of this market (45.8%), with its total number of active sites now reaching almost 80 million – comfortably ahead of nginx, which takes up second place with 34 million active sites.

LiteSpeed 5.1.13 addresses DDoS vulnerability

February saw some new releases of the LiteSpeed web server. Most notably, version 5.1.13 was released on 17 February, after some LiteSpeed Enterprise customers reported service disruptions. These were caused by a surge of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that specifically targeted a bug in LiteSpeed servers earlier that day. Rather impressively, it took LiteSpeed less than two hours to identify the heap buffer overflow that was responsible for the problem, push a bug fix build of 5.1.12, and release 5.1.13.

Looking ahead, it is likely that the first release in the 5.2 branch of LiteSpeed will support HTTP/2 Server Push, which could speed up some websites by allowing the server to send resources to clients before the browser has requested them. This feature has already been implemented in the second release candidate (5.2RC2), which was made available on 13 February.

LiteSpeed gained 42 million sites this month as a large number of sites under the .science gTLD reappeared. This did not have a positive impact on its computer count, however, which fell by 666 to 23,240.

Other new releases from web server vendors

Apache 2.2.32 was released on 13 January. This is the latest version in the 2.2 legacy branch, which now enforces a stricter HTTP request grammar, corresponding to RFC 7230 for request lines and request headers. This addresses a security vulnerability (CVE-2016-8743) that might have allowed malicious clients or downstream proxies to carry out response splitting and cache pollution attacks. This release also mitigates the "httpoxy" (CVE-2016-5387) issues that were already addressed in the 2.4 stable branch.

New stable and mainline versions of nginx were also released in the past month. nginx 1.10.3 stable was released on 31 January, followed by nginx 1.11.10 mainline on Valentine's Day. Both versions include several bugfixes, while the mainline release also introduces a few new features.

Meanwhile, documentation for the Microsoft IIS Administration API is now available. This REST API allows IIS instances to be configured with any HTTP client, using tools such as the one available at manage.iis.net. The rationale for providing the API is to have an open and standard interface that can be used from any platform, unlike AppCmd.exe, which can only be run on Windows.