In the May 2017 survey we received responses from 1,814,996,345 sites and 6,404,290 web-facing computers. Although the total number of sites has fallen slightly, by 1.4 million since April, the number of computers has grown by 83,000.
Large shifts in site counts
Although it fared well in other metrics (see below), nginx suffered a massive 30% loss of hostnames this month. With a net loss of more than 100 million sites, its market share has fallen by 5.71 percentage points to 13.5%. The majority of the sites that disappeared were Chinese-language spam sites hosted at Amazon Web Services in the United States and Japan.
Meanwhile, Microsoft gained 79 million sites, which has taken its market share up to 49.1%. This is Microsoft's highest market share in the 22-year history of the Web Server Survey, and also reflects a significant change in fortunes over the past year: Last June, Apache had the largest market share of websites, but now Microsoft's share is more than twice as large as Apache's, which fell by a further 1.73 percentage points this month to 20.95%.
nginx leads active site growth
Despite the large loss of hostnames, nginx gained nearly a million active sites, which has taken its active sites share back above 20%. This suggests most of the 104 million hostnames it lost did not have distinct content, and therefore were of little interest to ordinary web users, despite the apparent size of the change.
Apache continues to lead the active sites market quite comfortably with a 45.6% share, although a loss of 1.4 million active sites has brought this down by 0.67 percentage points. nginx stays firmly in second place, with more than twice as many active sites as Microsoft.
nginx's computer growth continues unabated
nginx's consistent computer growth has continued, making it look ever more likely to overtake Microsoft later in 2017. Its gain of 48,500 computers – combined with Microsoft's loss of 6,000 – has reduced the difference in their market shares by nearly a whole percentage point.
nginx is now within 3.46 percentage points of Microsoft's share of 23.8%; but Apache also maintains a comfortable lead in this market – it increased its web-facing computer count by 28,800 this month, keeping Apache's share above 43%.
nginx pushing others out of the top million
nginx is also continuing to make strong progress amongst the top million websites, where it has been ahead of Microsoft for the past few years. It was the only major vendor to increase its presence this month, resulting in thousands of competing vendors' websites being pushed out of the top million. Apache suffered most, with 3,200 Apache-powered sites departing the top million, but it still leads this market with a 40.5% presence.
Apache has exhibited a slow and steady decline over the past several years. Coupled with nginx's consistent growth within the top million sites, the gap between the two is ever decreasing; however, it looks like it will be a good year or two until nginx seriously starts to threaten Apache's lead.
New nginx 1.13 mainline branch
nginx 1.13.0 was released on 25th April. This is the first release on the new, actively-developed 1.13.x mainline branch, adding bugfixes and new features to what was essentially the most recent stable version of nginx (1.12.0).
The most notable new feature in nginx 1.13.0 is its support for TLS 1.3, which aims to be the latest and most secure version of the Transport Layer Security protocol – although not many underlying crypto libraries actually offer TLS 1.3 yet. The TLS 1.3 specification has not yet been finalised, although the working draft has been sufficient for some servers and clients to implement it. For example, Mozilla's NSS cryptographic library – which is used by Firefox – enables TLS 1.3 support by default.
Microsoft IIS Administration API enters general availability
The Microsoft IIS Administration API that we mentioned in February is now Generally Available. The newest 1.1.0 release also facilitates management of the IIS Central Certificate Store, and includes an improved certificate API. These features are intended to make it easier to manage certificates across entire farms of web servers.
LiteSpeed enters the Amazon cloud
LiteSpeed Technologies is now a Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services Partner Network (APN), coinciding with the release of the LiteSpeed Web Server AMI. This Amazon Machine Image is based on CentOS 7 with the LiteSpeed Web Server pre-installed. AWS users can now use this AMI to quickly deploy ready-to-use virtual machines that run the LiteSpeed Web Server in the cloud.
This month's Web Server Survey found 6.4 million websites running LiteSpeed, which encompasses 2.3 million active sites, more than 2 million unique domain names, and nearly 11,000 web-facing computers. One of the busiest sites currently using LiteSpeed is FanFiction.Net, which is an automated fan fiction archive.
Enter the Beaver
China saw a large number of new sites being served by the relatively unknown "Beaver" web server. Just over a million sites now exhibit the Beaver Server header, and these make use of more than 110,000 unique domain names – mostly under the .cn top-level domain. Most of the sites are hosted by Aliyun, which is China's largest cloud hosting provider, while the majority of the rest are hosted by other Chinese companies. Only a single Beaver site is hosted outside of China – this solitary instance is hosted in Japan, at Amazon's Tokyo AWS region.
The behaviour of these sites suggests that Beaver might not be an entirely new web server, but possibly an application based on Microsoft's HTTP Server API (HTTPAPI 2.0). This API lets C/C++ programmers receive HTTP requests and send responses without using Microsoft IIS. At least 38 million other websites also use HTTPAPI 2.0.
But most of the Beaver sites are currently inaccessible and display the following message: "According to the filing requirements of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the website is accessible only if the ICP information is accurate and the ICP license is filed". An ICP Filing ("Bei'an") is required by all content providers in China before they can use hosting and CDN products, but this only allows them to be used for informational purposes. A Commercial ICP Licence ("Zheng") is required for any website that sells goods or services that directly generate revenue online.
Pepyaka making the web more friendly
The little-known Pepyaka web server has also been quietly growing. This server is used predominantly by Wix, an Israeli company that provides a friendly website building platform to millions of users. Wix provides free website hosting under the *.wix.com domain, or customers can get a free custom domain name when upgrading to one of Wix's yearly premium plans.
This business model has led to a high ratio of domains to hostnames amongst the Pepyaka install base. Wix-hosted websites alone account for 1.4% of all unique domain names in use on the web, which is no mean feat. All of these sites are hosted within the Amazon Web Services cloud, using Pepyaka version 1.11.3. This version number, coupled with Wix's previous uses of nginx, suggests that it could be based on last year's mainline version of nginx.
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
Continue reading...
Large shifts in site counts
Although it fared well in other metrics (see below), nginx suffered a massive 30% loss of hostnames this month. With a net loss of more than 100 million sites, its market share has fallen by 5.71 percentage points to 13.5%. The majority of the sites that disappeared were Chinese-language spam sites hosted at Amazon Web Services in the United States and Japan.
Meanwhile, Microsoft gained 79 million sites, which has taken its market share up to 49.1%. This is Microsoft's highest market share in the 22-year history of the Web Server Survey, and also reflects a significant change in fortunes over the past year: Last June, Apache had the largest market share of websites, but now Microsoft's share is more than twice as large as Apache's, which fell by a further 1.73 percentage points this month to 20.95%.
nginx leads active site growth
Despite the large loss of hostnames, nginx gained nearly a million active sites, which has taken its active sites share back above 20%. This suggests most of the 104 million hostnames it lost did not have distinct content, and therefore were of little interest to ordinary web users, despite the apparent size of the change.
Apache continues to lead the active sites market quite comfortably with a 45.6% share, although a loss of 1.4 million active sites has brought this down by 0.67 percentage points. nginx stays firmly in second place, with more than twice as many active sites as Microsoft.
nginx's computer growth continues unabated
nginx's consistent computer growth has continued, making it look ever more likely to overtake Microsoft later in 2017. Its gain of 48,500 computers – combined with Microsoft's loss of 6,000 – has reduced the difference in their market shares by nearly a whole percentage point.
nginx is now within 3.46 percentage points of Microsoft's share of 23.8%; but Apache also maintains a comfortable lead in this market – it increased its web-facing computer count by 28,800 this month, keeping Apache's share above 43%.
nginx pushing others out of the top million
nginx is also continuing to make strong progress amongst the top million websites, where it has been ahead of Microsoft for the past few years. It was the only major vendor to increase its presence this month, resulting in thousands of competing vendors' websites being pushed out of the top million. Apache suffered most, with 3,200 Apache-powered sites departing the top million, but it still leads this market with a 40.5% presence.
Apache has exhibited a slow and steady decline over the past several years. Coupled with nginx's consistent growth within the top million sites, the gap between the two is ever decreasing; however, it looks like it will be a good year or two until nginx seriously starts to threaten Apache's lead.
New nginx 1.13 mainline branch
nginx 1.13.0 was released on 25th April. This is the first release on the new, actively-developed 1.13.x mainline branch, adding bugfixes and new features to what was essentially the most recent stable version of nginx (1.12.0).
The most notable new feature in nginx 1.13.0 is its support for TLS 1.3, which aims to be the latest and most secure version of the Transport Layer Security protocol – although not many underlying crypto libraries actually offer TLS 1.3 yet. The TLS 1.3 specification has not yet been finalised, although the working draft has been sufficient for some servers and clients to implement it. For example, Mozilla's NSS cryptographic library – which is used by Firefox – enables TLS 1.3 support by default.
Microsoft IIS Administration API enters general availability
The Microsoft IIS Administration API that we mentioned in February is now Generally Available. The newest 1.1.0 release also facilitates management of the IIS Central Certificate Store, and includes an improved certificate API. These features are intended to make it easier to manage certificates across entire farms of web servers.
LiteSpeed enters the Amazon cloud
LiteSpeed Technologies is now a Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services Partner Network (APN), coinciding with the release of the LiteSpeed Web Server AMI. This Amazon Machine Image is based on CentOS 7 with the LiteSpeed Web Server pre-installed. AWS users can now use this AMI to quickly deploy ready-to-use virtual machines that run the LiteSpeed Web Server in the cloud.
This month's Web Server Survey found 6.4 million websites running LiteSpeed, which encompasses 2.3 million active sites, more than 2 million unique domain names, and nearly 11,000 web-facing computers. One of the busiest sites currently using LiteSpeed is FanFiction.Net, which is an automated fan fiction archive.
Enter the Beaver
China saw a large number of new sites being served by the relatively unknown "Beaver" web server. Just over a million sites now exhibit the Beaver Server header, and these make use of more than 110,000 unique domain names – mostly under the .cn top-level domain. Most of the sites are hosted by Aliyun, which is China's largest cloud hosting provider, while the majority of the rest are hosted by other Chinese companies. Only a single Beaver site is hosted outside of China – this solitary instance is hosted in Japan, at Amazon's Tokyo AWS region.
The behaviour of these sites suggests that Beaver might not be an entirely new web server, but possibly an application based on Microsoft's HTTP Server API (HTTPAPI 2.0). This API lets C/C++ programmers receive HTTP requests and send responses without using Microsoft IIS. At least 38 million other websites also use HTTPAPI 2.0.
But most of the Beaver sites are currently inaccessible and display the following message: "According to the filing requirements of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the website is accessible only if the ICP information is accurate and the ICP license is filed". An ICP Filing ("Bei'an") is required by all content providers in China before they can use hosting and CDN products, but this only allows them to be used for informational purposes. A Commercial ICP Licence ("Zheng") is required for any website that sells goods or services that directly generate revenue online.
Pepyaka making the web more friendly
The little-known Pepyaka web server has also been quietly growing. This server is used predominantly by Wix, an Israeli company that provides a friendly website building platform to millions of users. Wix provides free website hosting under the *.wix.com domain, or customers can get a free custom domain name when upgrading to one of Wix's yearly premium plans.
This business model has led to a high ratio of domains to hostnames amongst the Pepyaka install base. Wix-hosted websites alone account for 1.4% of all unique domain names in use on the web, which is no mean feat. All of these sites are hosted within the Amazon Web Services cloud, using Pepyaka version 1.11.3. This version number, coupled with Wix's previous uses of nginx, suggests that it could be based on last year's mainline version of nginx.
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
Microsoft
812,157,80844.71%891,000,72149.09%4.38Apache
412,130,52622.69%380,321,10620.95%-1.73nginx
349,092,97519.22%245,114,31713.50%-5.71Google
19,121,6841.05%20,033,2291.10%0.05
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
Apache
78,489,47246.28%77,080,63845.61%-0.67nginx
33,176,49019.56%34,172,85520.22%0.66Microsoft
14,033,7798.28%13,225,1717.83%-0.45Google
12,048,0897.10%12,698,4257.51%0.41For more information see Active Sites
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
Apache
408,65440.87%405,44340.54%-0.32nginx
287,16528.72%290,03829.00%0.29Microsoft
100,59410.06%99,9479.99%-0.06Google
17,2441.72%16,5451.65%-0.07
DeveloperApril 2017PercentMay 2017PercentChange
Apache
2,751,54943.53%2,780,39343.41%-0.12Microsoft
1,532,15824.24%1,526,13523.83%-0.41nginx
1,255,76319.87%1,304,28420.37%0.50Continue reading...