June 2017 Web Server Survey

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In the June 2017 survey we received responses from 1,766,926,408 sites and 6,522,692 web-facing computers. This represents a loss of 48 million websites, although the total number of computers has grown by 118,000 (+1.8%).

All of the top three vendors lost sites in this month's survey, but all showed gains in web-facing computers. Many of the sites that disappeared were spam sites that used the .cn (China) top-level domain. Microsoft lost the largest number of sites – nearly 28 million – while Apache lost 8.9 million and nginx lost 5.4 million.

Apache still leads the market in terms of web-facing computers, but its share fell by 0.28 points to 43.1% despite gaining 33,200 additional computers. Apache also continues to lead the active sites market, and with net growth of 1.2 million active sites this month, its share has increased to 45.9%.

nginx gained the largest number of web-facing computers, increasing its total by 54,200 to 1.36 million (+4.2%), and taking its market share of computers up by 0.46 percentage points to 20.8%. It is now less than 3 percentage points behind Microsoft's share.

nginx is also still increasing its presence amongst the top million websites. This month it gained 939 top sites, in contrast to the losses felt by Apache and Microsoft, which saw 2,970 and 692 sites depart from the top million. Some of the lesser-used servers that also increased their presence in the top million included openresty, Varnish and Tengine.

Google overtakes Microsoft in active sites


Notably, Google has overtaken Microsoft in active sites – it now has 13.3 million, compared with Microsoft's 13.2 million. This gives Google a 7.8% share of the active sites market, although its share of all sites is only 1.1%.

Netcraft first started tracking Google's custom web server software as a major vendor group 10 years ago, when it was used by 2.7 million sites. Google's servers were originally grouped under Apache, as they were based on open source Apache code, but the amount of customisation warranted making a new group – and no doubt even more changes have taken place over the past 10 years. Today, there are over 20 million Google sites, around two-thirds of which are considered active. This is a much higher ratio than most other vendors see – for example, only 1.5% of the 862 million sites using Microsoft's web server software are deemed active.

The most commonly seen Google web server is GSE (Google Servlet Engine), which is used by millions of Blogger sites that use blogspot domains (e.g. funny-cats.blogspot.com and catversushuman.blogspot.ca), and also by many Blogger-powered sites that use custom domain names. GSE is also used by sites under the googledrive.com and googlegroups.com domains, along with some other Google services such as Gmail, although none has the volume of hostnames seen at Blogger.

Another Google web server is Google Frontend, which is used by hundreds of thousands of sites, including App Engine sites hosted under the appspot.com domain. This server was much more prominent in the past, as it was also used by Blogger sites before they switched to GSE. Back then, Google Frontend sites also used an acronym in their HTTP response headers (Server: GFE), but Google Frontend sites now return the full name of the server software, i.e. Server: Google Frontend.

Google Frontend is also used to serve some of Google's legacy sites and deprecated services, such as the former social networking site at jaiku.com. This was shut down by Google in 2012, and all pages on the site now use Google Frontend to serve error pages.

Another Google server – ghs – is responsible for redirecting traffic from googlepages.com sites that were created with Google Page Creator. This website creation service was shut down in 2009, but existing pages were migrated to Google Sites, which hosts user content in subdirectories under the sites.google.com hostname. When a browser visits a legacy hostname like sunsetpizza.googlepages.com, ghs will redirect the user to its new location at https://sites.google.com/site/sunsetpizza/.

Other Server headers used more sparingly by Google-hosted services include UploadServer, sffe, ESF (used by Google Docs), and gws.

wpid-wss-total.png


wpid-wss-share.png


DeveloperMay 2017PercentJune 2017PercentChange
Microsoft​
891,000,72149.09%862,255,58448.80%-0.29
Apache​
380,321,10620.95%371,461,39921.02%0.07
nginx​
245,114,31713.50%239,666,34513.56%0.06
Google​
20,033,2291.10%20,136,3041.14%0.04​
wpid-wss-active-share.png


DeveloperMay 2017PercentJune 2017PercentChange
Apache​
77,080,63845.61%78,279,58545.85%0.24
nginx​
34,172,85520.22%33,812,63619.81%-0.42
Google​
12,698,4257.51%13,337,2757.81%0.30
Microsoft​
13,225,1717.83%13,158,8957.71%-0.12​

For more information see Active Sites

wpid-wss-top-1m-share.png


DeveloperMay 2017PercentJune 2017PercentChange
Apache​
405,44340.54%402,47340.25%-0.30
nginx​
290,03829.00%290,97729.10%0.09
Microsoft​
99,9479.99%99,2559.93%-0.07
Google​
16,5451.65%17,0081.70%0.05​
wpid-wss-computer-share.png


DeveloperMay 2017PercentJune 2017PercentChange
Apache​
2,780,39343.41%2,813,54343.13%-0.28
Microsoft​
1,526,13523.83%1,538,76323.59%-0.24
nginx​
1,304,28420.37%1,358,51020.83%0.46​

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