In the May 2014 survey we received responses from 975,262,468 sites — 16 million more than last month.
Microsoft threatening Apache’s market lead
Microsoft gained nine million additional sites this month, increasing its market share by a further 0.37 percentage points. Meanwhile, despite gaining 4.3 million sites, Apache’s market share fell by 0.18 points. Although Apache still leads with 37.6% of all sites, Microsoft is now just 4.1 percentage points behind. Apache has been the most commonly used web server for more than 18 years, but this is the closest Microsoft has ever been to threatening this position.
Apache’s position is much stronger when considering only Active Sites — it retains an absolute majority of 52.3%, and second place is held by nginx (14.4%), rather than Microsoft (11.3%). By excluding much of the automatically-generated content present on the internet, the Active Sites metric better reflects web server market share amongst human-maintained web sites.
New releases of nginx
The total number of websites using nginx fell by 3.7 million this month; however, the losses were mostly isolated to just a few hosting companies. Nearly two million nginx sites disappeared at cloud hosting company Enzu, followed by 1.2 million at BurstNet. Within the top million sites, however, nginx was the only web server to grow — Microsoft, Apache, and Google all lost market share.
A new stable version of nginx was released on April 24. nginx 1.6.0 features
SPDY 3.1 support and various SSL improvements that were originally implemented in the 1.5.x mainline branch of releases. The previous mainline branch has also been superseded by
nginx 1.7.0, which added support for backend SSL certificate verification and support for
SNI while working with SSL backends.
Seven million new sites using Microsoft IIS
Nearly seven million of this month’s new websites are using Microsoft IIS. Around 11 thousand of these new sites are hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform (including a few
phishing sites), helping to maintain Microsoft’s position as the
largest Windows hosting company in terms on web-facing computers. Most of the new IIS sites at Azure are hosted in the US, with more than a third of the total being hosted in the North Central US Azure region alone.
Notably, www.apachelounge.com is one of this month’s websites which appears to have switched to Microsoft IIS. The Apache Lounge is a web forum primarily focused on running Apache in Windows environments, and has provided Windows Apache binaries for more than 10 years. The site understandably has a
long history of being hosted from an Apache web server, most recently on a Windows Server 2008 platform, but is now using Microsoft IIS 8.5 on Windows Server 2012.
All may not be as it seems, however, as the web server is still sending an X-Powered-By: Apache/2.4.9 (Win64) header. The web server is also reporting X-Powered-By: ARR/2.5, indicating the use of IIS’s load-balancing features. It is likely that Apache Lounge is powered by multiple Apache instances which are hidden behind a Microsoft IIS load balancer.
New gTLDs showing promising growth
Several more new generic top-level domains have shown rapid growth in this month’s survey. The .berlin gTLD, which was used by only two websites in last month’s survey, is now used by 40,000
websites. The domain started its
sunrise registration period on February 14, when trademark owners were able to register .berlin domains ahead of the March 16 deadline.
German news magazine Der Spiegel – one of Europe’s largest publications of its kind –
criticised the availability of .berlin and other new top-level domains, likening them to a housing bubble and suggesting that such domain names are a waste of money. The company behind the .berlin domain, dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG, was quick to reply pointing out that not only had Der Spiegel
applied for its own gTLD (.spiegel) two years ago, but it had also already registered the domain name
spiegel.berlin before its own article was published.
The .email gTLD is another one that has been thriving since the closure of its sunrise period: More than 12 thousand websites are now using .email, compared with only two last month. This gTLD is
one of many operated by Donuts Inc, and became generally available on March 19. Donuts applied to ICANN for more than 300 TLDs in 2012, 65 of which are already generally available for registration, including .support, .domains, .photos, .estate, .guru and .plumbing. A further 66 TLDs are scheduled for general availability between now and September, including .expert, .parts, .media, .toys, .wtf and .fail.
| Developer | April 2014 | Percent | May 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 361,853,003 | 37.74% | 366,262,346 | 37.56% | -0.18 |
| Microsoft | 316,843,695 | 33.04% | 325,854,054 | 33.41% | 0.37 |
| nginx | 146,204,067 | 15.25% | 142,426,538 | 14.60% | -0.64 |
| 20,983,310 | 2.19% | 20,685,165 | 2.12% | -0.07 |
| Developer | April 2014 | Percent | May 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 95,512,314 | 52.44% | 95,491,154 | 52.27% | -0.17 |
| nginx | 25,900,525 | 14.22% | 26,235,342 | 14.36% | 0.14 |
| Microsoft | 20,175,151 | 11.08% | 20,602,753 | 11.28% | 0.20 |
| 14,829,924 | 8.14% | 14,644,727 | 8.02% | -0.13 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | April 2014 | Percent | May 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 534,392 | 53.44% | 533,232 | 53.32% | -0.12 |
| nginx | 178,154 | 17.82% | 181,612 | 18.16% | 0.35 |
| Microsoft | 124,019 | 12.40% | 123,823 | 12.38% | -0.02 |
| 29,593 | 2.96% | 29,238 | 2.92% | -0.04 |