In the December 2014 survey we received responses from 915,780,262 sites and 5,034,578 web-facing computers.
This is the second month in a row where there has been a large drop in the total number of websites, giving this month the lowest count since January. As was the case in November, the loss has been concentrated at just a small number of hosting companies, with the ten largest drops accounting for over 52 million hostnames. The active sites and web facing computers metrics were not affected by the loss, with the sites involved being mostly advertising linkfarms, having very little unique content. The majority of these sites were running on Microsoft IIS, causing it to overtake Apache in the July 2014 survey. However the recent losses have resulted in its market share dropping to 29.8%, leaving it now over 10 percentage points behind Apache.
Despite losing more than six million hostnames this month, nginx outpaced all other major server vendors by gaining 22,300 web-facing computers. nginx is now used by nearly 11% of all web-facing computers – twice the share that it had two years ago.
Overall, the total number of web-facing computers in our survey increased by just over 40,000 this month, making nginx responsible for more than half the increase. Despite an increase of over 11,000 computers for Apache, and 1,700 for IIS, both continue to lose market share.
Thanks to continued strong growth at Amazon Web Services, Amazon is the largest hosting company by a considerable margin in terms of our web-facing computers metric (which includes web-facing virtual machines, providing that each has its own kernel and IP address). With nearly 300,000 web-facing computers in total, Amazon has just over twice as many as second-place OVH. In October, we reported that DigitalOcean had become the 4th largest hosting company in under 2 years, but it quickly reached third place in November and is continuing to close the gap on OVH.
Cloud growth
Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure expanded their cloud hosting footprints recently. Amazon opened a new European AWS region in Frankfurt, which augments its existing EU region in Ireland. Besides being able to host services closer to the center of Europe, the new region means that customers can now build multi-region applications with the assurance that their data will stay within the EU. The new Frankfurt region houses two EC2 availability zones and three AWS edge locations.
Microsoft's new Azure "geo" is in Australia, and consists of two geographically redundant regions in New South Wales and Victoria. This will help Microsoft to compete with Amazon's two EC2 availability zones in Sydney.
New TLDs
More new top-level domains showing strong growth in this month's survey include .nyc, which is targeted for use by New Yorkers, and .realtor, which is only allowed to be used by members of the National Association of Realtors or the Canadian Real Estate Association. These have grown from virtually nothing to a total of 40,000 and 80,000 sites respectively.
Ironically, one of this month's fastest growing new top-level domains started off as an April Fool's Day joke in 2009, when the founder of OVH announced the creation of the .ovh TLD – years before such things were actually possible. This joke resulted in over 22,000 requests to register .ovh domains within a few hours, demonstrating the potential demand for such domains. OVH eventually entered into a Registry Agreement with ICANN in January 2014, and the sunrise period for the .ovh TLD began in September. This month's survey saw the number of sites using .ovh domains grow from 6,000 to 63,000, likely due to the first 50,000 .ovh domains being given away for free, and with subsequent growth being fuelled by attractive pricing: new .ovh domains can currently be registered for only EUR 0.99 per year and renewed for EUR 1.99.
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
Continue reading...
This is the second month in a row where there has been a large drop in the total number of websites, giving this month the lowest count since January. As was the case in November, the loss has been concentrated at just a small number of hosting companies, with the ten largest drops accounting for over 52 million hostnames. The active sites and web facing computers metrics were not affected by the loss, with the sites involved being mostly advertising linkfarms, having very little unique content. The majority of these sites were running on Microsoft IIS, causing it to overtake Apache in the July 2014 survey. However the recent losses have resulted in its market share dropping to 29.8%, leaving it now over 10 percentage points behind Apache.
Despite losing more than six million hostnames this month, nginx outpaced all other major server vendors by gaining 22,300 web-facing computers. nginx is now used by nearly 11% of all web-facing computers – twice the share that it had two years ago.
Overall, the total number of web-facing computers in our survey increased by just over 40,000 this month, making nginx responsible for more than half the increase. Despite an increase of over 11,000 computers for Apache, and 1,700 for IIS, both continue to lose market share.
Thanks to continued strong growth at Amazon Web Services, Amazon is the largest hosting company by a considerable margin in terms of our web-facing computers metric (which includes web-facing virtual machines, providing that each has its own kernel and IP address). With nearly 300,000 web-facing computers in total, Amazon has just over twice as many as second-place OVH. In October, we reported that DigitalOcean had become the 4th largest hosting company in under 2 years, but it quickly reached third place in November and is continuing to close the gap on OVH.
Cloud growth
Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure expanded their cloud hosting footprints recently. Amazon opened a new European AWS region in Frankfurt, which augments its existing EU region in Ireland. Besides being able to host services closer to the center of Europe, the new region means that customers can now build multi-region applications with the assurance that their data will stay within the EU. The new Frankfurt region houses two EC2 availability zones and three AWS edge locations.
Microsoft's new Azure "geo" is in Australia, and consists of two geographically redundant regions in New South Wales and Victoria. This will help Microsoft to compete with Amazon's two EC2 availability zones in Sydney.
New TLDs
More new top-level domains showing strong growth in this month's survey include .nyc, which is targeted for use by New Yorkers, and .realtor, which is only allowed to be used by members of the National Association of Realtors or the Canadian Real Estate Association. These have grown from virtually nothing to a total of 40,000 and 80,000 sites respectively.
Ironically, one of this month's fastest growing new top-level domains started off as an April Fool's Day joke in 2009, when the founder of OVH announced the creation of the .ovh TLD – years before such things were actually possible. This joke resulted in over 22,000 requests to register .ovh domains within a few hours, demonstrating the potential demand for such domains. OVH eventually entered into a Registry Agreement with ICANN in January 2014, and the sunrise period for the .ovh TLD began in September. This month's survey saw the number of sites using .ovh domains grow from 6,000 to 63,000, likely due to the first 50,000 .ovh domains being given away for free, and with subsequent growth being fuelled by attractive pricing: new .ovh domains can currently be registered for only EUR 0.99 per year and renewed for EUR 1.99.
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
Apache
350,853,79837.05%358,159,40539.11%2.06Microsoft
306,029,30732.31%272,967,29429.81%-2.51nginx
139,130,99214.69%132,467,76314.47%-0.23Google
19,560,2062.07%20,011,2602.19%0.12
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
Apache
90,850,28551.10%90,846,94050.57%-0.53nginx
25,987,02214.62%26,466,55914.73%0.11Microsoft
20,716,80911.65%21,057,29211.72%0.07Google
13,787,2707.76%14,184,3207.90%0.14For more information see Active Sites
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
Apache
500,11550.01%498,55349.86%-0.16nginx
204,09220.41%207,18620.72%0.31Microsoft
124,60712.46%124,56112.46%-0.00Google
25,9952.60%25,5032.55%-0.05
DeveloperNovember 2014PercentDecember 2014PercentChange
Apache
2,368,86947.43%2,380,29147.28%-0.15Microsoft
1,519,57630.42%1,521,30230.22%-0.21nginx
529,87010.61%552,24510.97%0.36Continue reading...