December 2020 Web Server Survey
22nd December, 2020
In the December 2020 survey we received responses from 1,228,111,563 sites across 263,413,876 unique domains and 10,553,965 web-facing computers. The reflects a loss of 1.84 million sites, 374,000 domains, and 10,600 computers.
Overall, nginx lost the largest number of sites this month (-3.15 million), while Apache gained most (3.04 million); yet in terms of active sites, nginx gained 411,000, while Apache gained only 100,000.
Microsoft, Apache and nginx each suffered losses in their total number of domains, although nginx's loss was small enough that its market share increased slightly. 30.3% of the world's domains are now powered by nginx, compared with 26.4% powered by Apache. Despite losses affecting each major webserver vendor, the causes were independent in each case; for example nginx’s 34,000 loss resulting from a drop of 387,000 domains at Freenom.
OpenResty is continuing to show strong growth, with GoDaddy's use of the web server for its parked domains. It now powers 71.3 million sites across 36.9 million domains and 84,680 web-facing computers.
The number of web-facing computers running nginx, Apache and Microsoft web server software also fell this month. The largest loss was 38,600 web-facing computers for nginx, which took its total down to 3.63 million and its share down by 0.33 percentage points to 34.4%, leaving it just over one percentage point ahead of Apache. Microsoft lost 14,700 computers, while Apache lost 5,820.
Improvements to the million busiest sites methodology has resulted in a number of market share movements. The biggest drop was seen for Apache, with its share down by 4.3 percentage points. Although it continues to lead this market with a share of 24.6%, nginx is now much closer behind with a 23.2% share of the top million, despite also experiencing a drop, and losing 2.0 percentage points. Cloudflare experienced the largest increase, up 1.4 percentage points to reach a 15.2% market share.
Other vendor and hosting news
- The first release candidate of Caddy 2.3 was announced on 12 December.
- nginx 1.19.6 mainline was released on 15 December. This version includes four bugfixes, including one for a bug that was introduced in the previous release, where a segmentation fault could have occurred when HTTPS was used.
- njs 0.5.0 was released on 1 December. This is the latest version of the JavaScript-based scripting language that can be used to extend nginx functionality.
- Apache Tomcat 7.0.107 was released on 23 November, followed by the releases of Tomcat 8.5.61, 9.0.41 and 10.0.0 (beta) on 8 December.
- OpenLiteSpeed 1.7.7 was released on 9 December.
- Microsoft has added new capabilities to its Azure Government cloud, expanded its Azure Government Secret cloud, and announced a new Azure Government Top Secret cloud to handle top secret classified data.
| Developer | November 2020 | Percent | December 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 414,338,895 | 33.69% | 411,191,213 | 33.48% | -0.21 |
| Apache | 329,384,399 | 26.78% | 332,420,092 | 27.07% | 0.29 |
| Microsoft | 97,283,716 | 7.91% | 97,532,495 | 7.94% | 0.03 |
| 45,597,737 | 3.71% | 46,924,883 | 3.82% | 0.11 |
Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in November 2020
2nd December, 2020
| Rank | Performance Graph | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York Internet (NYI) | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.536 | 0.058 | 0.115 | 0.116 |
| 2 | Webair | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.320 | 0.069 | 0.138 | 0.139 |
| 3 | Hyve Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.171 | 0.075 | 0.149 | 0.149 |
| 4 | Bigstep | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.229 | 0.079 | 0.157 | 0.157 |
| 5 | ServerStack | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.242 | 0.081 | 0.162 | 0.162 |
| 6 | krystal.uk | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.252 | 0.089 | 0.178 | 0.178 |
| 7 | www.dinahosting.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.306 | 0.093 | 0.185 | 0.185 |
| 8 | Pair Networks | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.362 | 0.097 | 0.193 | 0.193 |
| 9 | www.choopa.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.254 | 0.005 | 0.025 | 0.025 |
| 10 | CWCS Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.330 | 0.080 | 0.161 | 0.161 |
The most reliable hosting company site in November 2020 was New York Internet (NYI), which responded to all of Netcraft’s requests in November. NYI offers a comprehensive set of hybrid IT solutions across cloud, multi-cloud, colocation and bare metal in its US data centres. So far in 2020, NYI has appeared seven times in the top 10.
November 2020 Web Server Survey
30th November, 2020
In the November 2020 survey we received responses from 1,229,948,224 sites across 263,787,870 unique domains and 10,564,577 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 24.2 million sites and 115,000 computers, but a loss of 310,000 domains.
Apache now powers 28.9% of the world's top million websites, where its presence has grown by 6,431 sites since last month. This has increased its lead over its closest competitor, nginx, which lost 2,563 sites from the top million and is now 3.72 percentage points behind Apache's leading share.
nginx continues to dominate in terms of web-facing computers, where its total rose by 88,700 to 3.67 million (+2.48%) computers and its share has grown by 0.47 percentage points to 34.7%. Although Apache gained 24,400 computers this month, its own share has now fallen to less than a third.
nginx also maintains its lead in two other metrics, with a total of 414 million sites (33.7% share) and 79.8 million domains (30.3%), while Apache still has the largest share of active sites (25.9%).
The number of domains powered by Microsoft web server suffered another noticeable fall this month, dropping by 473,000 to 19.1 million (-2.41%), reducing its share to 7.25%. Some of this decline is still being driven by GoDaddy's parked domains being moved to OpenResty web servers.
More than 36 million unique domains are served by OpenResty, making it the third most commonly used server by that metric, and putting it over 15 million domains ahead of Cloudflare. OpenResty is a scalable web platform based on NGINX and LuaJIT, which is a just-in-time compiler for the Lua language.
Some of the most commonly visited websites powered by OpenResty include Tumblr, Firefox Monitor, Basecamp and a few adult video sites. The 36.6 million domains powered by OpenResty are served from just 81,900 computers.
Other vendor and hosting news
- nginx 1.19.5 mainline was released on 24 November.
- NGINX Unit 1.21.0 was released on 19 November.
- Apache Tomcat 7.0.107, 8.5.60, 9.0.40 and 10.0.0.M10 were released on 17 November.
- OpenLiteSpeed 1.7.6 was released on 9 November, followed by OpenLiteSpeed 1.6.18 Stable on 24 November.
- Microsoft claims it will become the first major cloud provider to track hourly energy consumption and renewable energy matching in a commercial product using the Vattenfall 24/7 Matching solution for its new datacenter regions in Sweden, which will be available next year.
- DigitalOcean has introduced storage-optimized Droplets with NVMe SSDs, and reduced the price of its memory-optimized Droplets.
- Dozens of apps, websites and other online services including Coinbase, Flickr, Roku and The Washington Post were affected by an outage at Amazon's us-east-1 geographic region on 25 November.
| Developer | October 2020 | Percent | November 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 412,851,940 | 34.24% | 414,338,895 | 33.69% | -0.55 |
| Apache | 326,050,973 | 27.04% | 329,384,399 | 26.78% | -0.26 |
| Microsoft | 92,405,675 | 7.66% | 97,283,716 | 7.91% | 0.25 |
| 46,583,411 | 3.86% | 45,597,737 | 3.71% | -0.16 |
Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in October 2020
4th November, 2020
| Rank | Performance Graph | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bigstep | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.239 | 0.078 | 0.156 | 0.156 |
| 2 | hostingplus.cl | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.364 | 0.214 | 0.429 | 0.429 |
| 3 | www.choopa.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.274 | 0.005 | 0.025 | 0.025 |
| 4 | Hyve Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.181 | 0.075 | 0.151 | 0.151 |
| 5 | ServerStack | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.253 | 0.083 | 0.165 | 0.165 |
| 6 | www.flexential.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.295 | 0.088 | 0.176 | 0.176 |
| 7 | krystal.uk | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.255 | 0.090 | 0.179 | 0.179 |
| 8 | Pair Networks | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.370 | 0.096 | 0.192 | 0.192 |
| 9 | Rackspace | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.010 | 0.513 | 0.013 | 0.025 | 0.025 |
| 10 | EveryCity | SmartOS | 0:00:00 | 0.010 | 0.258 | 0.088 | 0.176 | 0.176 |
Bigstep had the most reliable hosting company site in October 2020. Both Bigstep and Hosting Plus responded to all of Netcraft's requests in October, but a faster average connection time gives Bigstep the edge. Bigstep offers "bare metal" cloud hosting to provide the flexibility of cloud hosting without the associated overhead and performance reductions of virtualization, and has now appeared in the top 10 for four consecutive months.
Exploring 8chan's hosting infrastructure
23rd October, 2020
In a recent post, Brian Krebs discussed a technique for disrupting 8chan, a controversial message board. Ron Guilmette, a security researcher, spotted that N.T. Technology, the hosting company owned by 8chan’s current operator, no longer has the right to transact business as it is in the “administrative hold” state. ARIN, the Internet registry N.T. Technology obtained its IP address allocation from, would be within its rights to reclaim the IP address space.
Ron Guilmette is an expert in this type of analysis - last year he discovered the theft of $50 million worth of IP addresses in AFRINIC’s service region.
However, taking down 8chan is unlikely to be as simple as requesting that ARIN deallocates its IP address space. After deallocation, the IP addresses may continue to be advertised as fullbogons - netblocks that are used on the Internet despite not being assigned to an end user. While some Internet service providers do block fullbogons, this is by no means universal.
Furthermore, 8chan’s main domain name, 8kun.top, is not currently hosted on N.T. Technology’s infrastructure, so would not be affected by ARIN deallocating N.T. Technology’s address space. It currently resolves to 203.28.246.1, which belongs to a netblock delegated to VanwaTech. VanwaTech, also known as OrcaTech, is a hosting company based in Vancouver, Washington and owned by Nick Lim. Nick Lim previously served as the CTO of Epik for a short period of time, a hosting company that briefly hosted 8chan after Cloudflare terminated its contract with 8chan.
Diagram showing 8chan's hosting infrastructure
October 2020 Web Server Survey
21st October, 2020
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 |