In the January 2018 survey we received responses from 1,805,260,010 sites across 213,053,157 unique domain names and 7,228,005 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 214,000 computers, but only 183,000 domains. Overall hostname growth was 71 million, although the number of active sites fell slightly, by 311,000.
DPS powering GoDaddy's Website Builder
While the total number of domains across all web server vendors grew slightly, 1.5 million fewer domains used a Microsoft web server in the January 2018 survey. Its share of domain names has fallen by 0.74 points to 26.1%. Contributing to that loss were more than 985,000 unique domains hosted by GoDaddy, which are now using a lesser-known web server called DPS.
DPS (Data Protection Server) is now the 10th largest server by domains, and it is used exclusively by GoDaddy to host customer sites that have been created with its Website Builder tool. The DPS server appears to be frequently updated: sites using it currently return the Server: DPS/1.1.20 header, but these sites were using version 1.1.19 when the data was collected for the January 2018 survey. In the December 2017 survey, the sites were using version 1.1.16, and 1.1.10 in November 2017.
Cloud balancing with Pepyaka and F5 BIG-IP
Another lesser-known server, Pepyaka, also saw massive domain growth at a single hosting company this month. The Israeli web development platform Wix uses Pepyaka to host its customers' sites in the Amazon Web Services cloud, but many of these sites did not identify which server software they were using during the previous survey, causing a temporary absence. The number of domains using Pepyaka at AWS is now back up to more than 1.8 million, making it the 6th largest server by domains.
Nearly all of the Wix sites hosted at AWS use Pepyaka 1.11.3, which is likely based on the July 2016 mainline release of nginx 1.11.3; but it looks like Wix is in the process of rolling out an updated version: This month saw the appearance of 22 sites using Pepyaka 1.13.4, which most likely corresponds to the August 2017 mainline release of nginx 1.13.4.
Last month's temporary absence of Pepyaka could have been indicative of wider scale experimentation by Wix. Many of Wix's sites were served from machines that exhibited the TCP/IP characteristic of F5 BIG-IP, whereas this month, those sites are back to using Pepyaka running on Linux.
Wix has been a long-time user of nginx, and originally moved all user traffic to the commercial NGINX Plus product to future-proof its load balancing needs. The temporary appearance of F5 BIG-IP demonstrates that Wix may have been testing the waters with a different load balancing setup.
For most of its life, F5 BIG-IP has only been available on specialist hardware devices, such as BIG-IP appliances or VIPRION chassis; but F5's Virtual Editions make it possible to run BIG-IP software on commodity hardware in the cloud. F5 offers several BIG-IP Virtual Edition Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in the AWS Marketplace, with pay-as-you-go licensing costs ranging from $0.33 to $4.40 per hour.
In May 2017, F5 also announced new public cloud solutions for Azure and Google Cloud, as well as a private cloud solution for the OpenStack cloud platform. This month's survey found more than 13 million domains being served from F5 BIG-IP devices, with Apache being the most commonly seen Server header.
Apache leads in most metrics, but nginx dominates in growth
Across the entire market, Apache remains in the lead with a 38.2% share of domains, but the ongoing trend makes it likely that both Apache and Microsoft could be overtaken by nginx in the next few years. nginx has continued to steadily increase its domain share, with a 0.21 point gain to 20.5% this month, while Apache has been experiencing a general decline of market share in recent years.
nginx's persistent growth has also manifested itself in every other metric this month, with it gaining the largest number of sites, active sites and web-facing computers, as well as increasing its presence amongst the top million sites. nginx is now used by 23.5% of all web-facing computers and 30.5% of the top million sites, but Apache still has the largest number of active sites, computers, domains and top-million sites.
The only metric graphed below in which Apache does not take the lead is hostnames, where Microsoft has a total of 575 million sites; but this metric is prone to fluctuations and is less indicative of market success. Microsoft has the second largest number of domains in the survey, but has been ranked third in web-facing computers since it was overtaken by nginx in October 2017.
While 1.5 million web-facing computers currently run Microsoft web server software, a slightly larger number – 1.8 million – run Windows operating systems. The bulk of the difference is made up of Windows computers that either run Apache or reverse-proxy traffic from backend Apache servers. The most commonly used Windows version is Windows Server 2008, followed by 2012 and then the aging, unsupported Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2016 accounts for only 3.7% of all Windows web-facing computers at the moment, but it is steadily growing – this month, the number of Windows Server 2016 computers grew by 14% to 66,800.
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
Continue reading...
DPS powering GoDaddy's Website Builder
While the total number of domains across all web server vendors grew slightly, 1.5 million fewer domains used a Microsoft web server in the January 2018 survey. Its share of domain names has fallen by 0.74 points to 26.1%. Contributing to that loss were more than 985,000 unique domains hosted by GoDaddy, which are now using a lesser-known web server called DPS.
DPS (Data Protection Server) is now the 10th largest server by domains, and it is used exclusively by GoDaddy to host customer sites that have been created with its Website Builder tool. The DPS server appears to be frequently updated: sites using it currently return the Server: DPS/1.1.20 header, but these sites were using version 1.1.19 when the data was collected for the January 2018 survey. In the December 2017 survey, the sites were using version 1.1.16, and 1.1.10 in November 2017.
Cloud balancing with Pepyaka and F5 BIG-IP
Another lesser-known server, Pepyaka, also saw massive domain growth at a single hosting company this month. The Israeli web development platform Wix uses Pepyaka to host its customers' sites in the Amazon Web Services cloud, but many of these sites did not identify which server software they were using during the previous survey, causing a temporary absence. The number of domains using Pepyaka at AWS is now back up to more than 1.8 million, making it the 6th largest server by domains.
Nearly all of the Wix sites hosted at AWS use Pepyaka 1.11.3, which is likely based on the July 2016 mainline release of nginx 1.11.3; but it looks like Wix is in the process of rolling out an updated version: This month saw the appearance of 22 sites using Pepyaka 1.13.4, which most likely corresponds to the August 2017 mainline release of nginx 1.13.4.
Last month's temporary absence of Pepyaka could have been indicative of wider scale experimentation by Wix. Many of Wix's sites were served from machines that exhibited the TCP/IP characteristic of F5 BIG-IP, whereas this month, those sites are back to using Pepyaka running on Linux.
Wix has been a long-time user of nginx, and originally moved all user traffic to the commercial NGINX Plus product to future-proof its load balancing needs. The temporary appearance of F5 BIG-IP demonstrates that Wix may have been testing the waters with a different load balancing setup.
For most of its life, F5 BIG-IP has only been available on specialist hardware devices, such as BIG-IP appliances or VIPRION chassis; but F5's Virtual Editions make it possible to run BIG-IP software on commodity hardware in the cloud. F5 offers several BIG-IP Virtual Edition Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in the AWS Marketplace, with pay-as-you-go licensing costs ranging from $0.33 to $4.40 per hour.
In May 2017, F5 also announced new public cloud solutions for Azure and Google Cloud, as well as a private cloud solution for the OpenStack cloud platform. This month's survey found more than 13 million domains being served from F5 BIG-IP devices, with Apache being the most commonly seen Server header.
Apache leads in most metrics, but nginx dominates in growth
Across the entire market, Apache remains in the lead with a 38.2% share of domains, but the ongoing trend makes it likely that both Apache and Microsoft could be overtaken by nginx in the next few years. nginx has continued to steadily increase its domain share, with a 0.21 point gain to 20.5% this month, while Apache has been experiencing a general decline of market share in recent years.
nginx's persistent growth has also manifested itself in every other metric this month, with it gaining the largest number of sites, active sites and web-facing computers, as well as increasing its presence amongst the top million sites. nginx is now used by 23.5% of all web-facing computers and 30.5% of the top million sites, but Apache still has the largest number of active sites, computers, domains and top-million sites.
The only metric graphed below in which Apache does not take the lead is hostnames, where Microsoft has a total of 575 million sites; but this metric is prone to fluctuations and is less indicative of market success. Microsoft has the second largest number of domains in the survey, but has been ranked third in web-facing computers since it was overtaken by nginx in October 2017.
While 1.5 million web-facing computers currently run Microsoft web server software, a slightly larger number – 1.8 million – run Windows operating systems. The bulk of the difference is made up of Windows computers that either run Apache or reverse-proxy traffic from backend Apache servers. The most commonly used Windows version is Windows Server 2008, followed by 2012 and then the aging, unsupported Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2016 accounts for only 3.7% of all Windows web-facing computers at the moment, but it is steadily growing – this month, the number of Windows Server 2016 computers grew by 14% to 66,800.
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
Microsoft
535,762,81330.89%575,026,64831.85%0.96Apache
446,418,87825.74%491,259,91827.21%1.47nginx
395,881,69022.83%458,386,42325.39%2.56Google
21,308,0691.23%21,657,7961.20%-0.03
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
Apache
76,427,23444.44%75,212,93243.82%-0.63nginx
36,333,28021.13%36,504,57721.27%0.14Google
13,946,9348.11%13,270,3397.73%-0.38Microsoft
12,133,8887.06%12,147,2787.08%0.02For more information see Active Sites
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
Apache
373,92637.39%370,29337.03%-0.36nginx
301,66830.17%304,62930.46%0.30Microsoft
96,2499.62%95,6769.57%-0.06Google
14,6671.47%14,1831.42%-0.05
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
Apache
2,980,36842.49%3,039,74742.06%-0.43nginx
1,627,45423.20%1,701,48523.54%0.34Microsoft
1,531,14921.83%1,538,71721.29%-0.54
DeveloperDecember 2017PercentJanuary 2018PercentChange
Apache
81,368,05938.22%81,428,53038.22%-0.00Microsoft
57,121,39626.83%55,588,83326.09%-0.74nginx
43,236,41420.31%43,728,00720.52%0.21Google
1,831,2830.86%1,849,5540.87%0.01Continue reading...