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In the December 2017 survey we received responses from 1,734,290,608 sites across 212,870,632 unique domain names and 7,014,428 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 5.34 million domains and 121,000 computers.

Web Server Developers – Market Share of Domains

The number of hostnames in use on the web has been a headline metric since the inception of the Web Server Survey, but it has been subjected to quite large fluctuations in recent years. Netcraft has therefore introduced the number of unique domains as an additional metric that provides a more stable view of the web.

The domains metric is not influenced by wildcarded domains or other large numbers of sites that can be hosted under a single domain name with minimal effort; but unlike the active sites metric, the domains metric still takes account of sites that are still under construction, or running hosting company or domain registrar holding pages.

The noticeable spike in Apache-powered domains in May 2013 was caused by the largest hosting company of the time, GoDaddy, switching a large number of its domains from Microsoft IIS to Apache Traffic Server (ATS) . GoDaddy switched back to using IIS 7.5 a few months later.

Today, Apache still has the largest market share by number of domains, with 81.4 million giving it a market share of 38.2%. It also saw the largest gain this month, increasing its total by 1.53 million. This growth was closely followed by nginx, with a gain of 1.09 million domains increasing its total to 47.5 million. While Microsoft leads by overall number of hostnames, it lags in 3rd position when considering the number of unique domains those sites run on, with a total of 22.8 million.

Web-facing Computers

The number of web-facing computers provides an alternative view that corresponds more closely to the install base of each server vendor.

With 1.63 million web-facing computers, nginx is already 97,800 computers ahead of Microsoft since it took second place in October, but Apache remains much further ahead with a total of 2.98 million. Apache experienced the largest gain of 58,000 computers this month, closely followed by nginx with 49,000, and with Microsoft trailing with an increase of just 22,000.

Web Server Updates

Microsoft’s Internet Information Services platform has benefitted from a few improvements since the publication of last month’s survey. The newest version of the IIS Administration API (2.2.0) introduced new endpoints that make it easy to monitor the health of a web server, as well as the individual websites and application pools running on it. There is also a new configuration endpoint for the files API, which allows the API’s root folders to be configured – this means administrators no longer have to edit a file to configure which sections of the file system can be accessed via the API.

Version 1.0 of the IIS CORS Module, which works on IIS 7.5 or later, was also released in November. This enables support for the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing protocol, which lets webpages make use of resources that are hosted on other websites, such as web fonts and AJAX endpoints. If a website hosts these resources without setting a suitable CORS policy, the default same-origin policy enforced by all browsers would prevent other websites from accessing them.

The latest version of the open source LiteSpeed HTTP server, OpenLiteSpeed 1.4.28 (stable), was released on 8 November. This release adds multithreading APIs for LSIAPI – the API that allows it to support third-party modules. Although there are only 12,400 web-facing computers running LiteSpeed, these computers host 2.42 million domains. It is not clear how many of these computers are already running LiteSpeed 1.4.28, as this server does not expose version information in its headers.

lighttpd 1.4.48 was subsequently released on 11 November. This adds a new mod_authn_sasl module, which provides Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) authentication similar to Apache’s libapache2-mod-authn-sasl module. With 20,800 web-facing computers running lighttpd, it has a greater install base than LiteSpeed, but its market share of domains is noticeably smaller with a count of 565,000.

nginx 1.13.7 was released on 21 November, although this addresses several bugs rather than introducing any new features. There are, however, several new features in the latest version of its commercially supported product, NGINX Plus Release 14, which was announced on 12 December. This release features several improvements, including an updated live monitoring dashboard and JSON support in its nginScript scripting language; and there is also a technology preview of its extended clustering support, which lets NGINX Plus instances in a cluster share state information.

For more information see Active Sites