In the March 2019 survey we received responses from 1,462,021,378 sites, 232,162,099 unique domains, and 8,526,624 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 15.8 million sites, but a gain of 2.57 million domains and 160k web-facing computers.
The March survey brings major upheaval in the domains metric. A large 8 million domain switch from Microsoft to nginx at GoDaddy has allowed nginx to overtake Microsoft to gain second place. Many of these freshly-switched domains do not host distinct content, instead redirecting elsewhere. Accordingly, nginx's share of active sites increased by a more moderate 3.3%. The total number of domains using nginx grew by 15.4%, a 3.24 percentage point increase of market share. Microsoft lost 3.95 p.p. Both remain some way behind Apache in the domains metric, which is 13.8 million domains ahead of nginx.
The largest three vendors - Apache, Microsoft, and nginx - showed at least minor increases in the number of active sites using their respective platforms this month. However, there has been an overall decrease in active site numbers over the past year. Apache in particular has seen a significant drop in active sites of around 20 million. In contrast, the LiteSpeed web server has seen more stable growth from month to month, having increased 960k (+31.7%) over the past year. Cloudflare’s server software, which had previously identified itself as a flavour of nginx prior to 2018, also demonstrated significant growth, serving content for 4.54 million more active sites (+65.6%) than it did a year ago.
Within the top million busiest sites, nginx continues to increase its share of the market, with a further small increase of 0.078 p.p. this month. Apache had its first monthly increase since September 2013, gaining back 0.051 p.p. Apache has been on a downward trend since late 2011 when it held around a 66% majority. Despite this, it has still remained the largest vendor amongst the million busiest sites, despite its market share halving to 32.5% as of March 2019. Microsoft servers have also seen a general decrease of market share over time, and its share has fallen to just under 9% this month.
F5 Acquires NGINX
On March 11th, F5 Networks, Inc. announced its acquisition of NGINX, Inc., the developer of the open source nginx web server. A similar announcement was made by NGINX on their website the same day. The acquisition comes with a $670 million price tag.
F5 and NGINX both provide rival sets of products, although the two have traditionally targeted different communities. F5’s BIG-IP line-up provides a variety of specialised products and service-based solutions for application delivery networking. Much of the key functionality provided by BIG-IP products, such as reverse proxying and load-balancing, overlap with the feature set of NGINX Plus, an exclusively software-based product providing a load balancer, web server, and content cache, along with exclusive features not included in the open-source edition of nginx. NGINX has made numerous blog posts and guides promoting its NGINX Plus product over F5’s BIG-IP, with competitive pricing and greater developer agility being common points of discussion.
In March 2019, Netcraft identified 12.6 million domains being served by F5 BIG-IP systems. Most of these BIG-IP systems are used in conjunction with other web server software.
| Developer | February 2019 | Percent | March 2019 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 386,522,266 | 26.16% | 403,603,745 | 27.61% | 1.45 |
| Microsoft | 419,972,039 | 28.42% | 381,017,776 | 26.06% | -2.36 |
| nginx | 374,544,606 | 25.34% | 375,431,606 | 25.68% | 0.33 |
| 23,912,250 | 1.62% | 24,809,682 | 1.70% | 0.08 |
