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.
DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
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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.
DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
Microsoft
704,000,53039.99%812,157,80844.71%4.73Apache
383,707,11221.79%412,130,52622.69%0.90nginx
350,540,37219.91%349,092,97519.22%-0.69Google
18,849,1711.07%19,121,6841.05%-0.02DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
Apache
79,942,44545.82%78,489,47246.28%0.46nginx
34,317,97219.67%33,176,49019.56%-0.11Microsoft
15,611,2568.95%14,033,7798.28%-0.67Google
11,684,6776.70%12,048,0897.10%0.41For more information see Active Sites
DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
Apache
410,61641.06%408,65440.87%-0.20nginx
285,00128.50%287,16528.72%0.22Microsoft
101,16310.12%100,59410.06%-0.06Google
17,5381.75%17,2441.72%-0.03DeveloperMarch 2017PercentApril 2017PercentChange
Apache
2,746,52843.80%2,751,54943.53%-0.27Microsoft
1,533,65824.46%1,532,15824.24%-0.22nginx
1,225,84219.55%1,255,76319.87%0.32Continue reading...