In the March 2014 survey we received responses from 919,533,715 sites — around half a million fewer than last month.
Apache has gained some breathing space this month. Nearly a year of strong market share growth by
Microsoft eventually culminated in the gap between Apache and Microsoft being reduced to only 5.4 percentage points. After the gap dropped to its lowest point
last month, Microsoft had
looked set to usurp Apache as the most common web server within a matter of months. This month’s survey saw Microsoft lose 15.8 million sites and Apache gain 3.2 million, however. Apache’s market share increased to 38.6%, 7.5 percentage points ahead of Microsoft and bucking the recent trend.
Most of Microsoft’s losses this month were seen at
Nobis Technology Group, where more than 30 million link-farming sites stopped operating. Nobis is a private holding company, which owns the DarkStar voice communications network and
Ubiquity Hosting Solutions, which has seven data centres across the United States.
nginx gained 5 million sites this month, increasing its market share to 15.6%. The latest mainline version of nginx (1.5.10) now supports
SPDY 3.1, which extends the flow control features of SPDY 3.0 by allowing different sessions within a single connection to send data at different rates. It is no surprise that SPDY 3.1 is already supported in the Google Chrome web browser;
SPDY was primarily developed by Google, and is one of their
trademarks. SPDY 3.1 has also been supported in
Mozilla Firefox since 4th February 2014.
Content delivery network CloudFlare — which uses its own web server software based on nginx —
rolled out SPDY 3.1 support for all of its customers in February. Since last month, Netcraft’s
SSL Survey has identified a four-fold increase in the number of HTTPS websites supporting SPDY 3.1, most of which are hosted by CloudFlare. A smaller number of these SPDY 3.1 sites are hosted by the owner of the WordPress.com blogging platform, Automattic, which was one of the sponsors of the ngx_http_spdy_module.
Mozilla has been planning to remove SPDY 2 support from Firefox since September 2013, and this looks set to happen with the release of
Firefox 28. Some developers
asked for SPDY 2 support to be retained, arguing that dropping support for SPDY 2 would effectively drop SPDY support in many SPDY-enabled websites. However, nginx and CloudFlare now supporting SPDY 3.1 allays some of that concern.
LibreOffice — the free open source office suite bundled with Ubuntu Linux — moved its website from an Apache web server to nginx at the end of January, apparently for
performance reasons. Incidentally, this further distances LibreOffice from the Apache Software Foundation – LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, before the latter was given to the ASF where development continued under the name of
Apache OpenOffice.
More than 30 new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) were delegated to the Root Zone during February, making them officially part of the internet. There are now 471 top level domains in total. The new ones added in February included .flights, .wiki, .xyz, .fish and .移动 (xn--6frz82g – Chinese for “mobile”).
Many of these new gTLDs were applied for by
Donuts Inc, a US domain registry which was founded in 2011. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Paul Stahura, previously founded domain name registrar eNom in 1997.
Donuts raised more than $100,000,000 in its Series A financing round and applied to ICANN for more than 300 TLDs in 2012. As a registry, Donuts does not sell domain names directly to the public; instead, customers must purchase them from one of its accredited registrars.
| Developer | February 2014 | Percent | March 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 351,700,572 | 38.22% | 354,956,660 | 38.60% | 0.38 |
| Microsoft | 301,781,997 | 32.80% | 286,014,566 | 31.10% | -1.69 |
| nginx | 138,056,444 | 15.00% | 143,095,181 | 15.56% | 0.56 |
| 21,129,509 | 2.30% | 20,960,422 | 2.28% | -0.02 |
| Developer | February 2014 | Percent | March 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 94,741,928 | 52.68% | 93,759,928 | 52.18% | -0.50 |
| nginx | 24,206,737 | 13.46% | 25,497,586 | 14.19% | 0.73 |
| Microsoft | 21,196,966 | 11.79% | 20,436,280 | 11.37% | -0.41 |
| 15,245,912 | 8.48% | 14,967,579 | 8.33% | -0.15 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | February 2014 | Percent | March 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 539,129 | 53.91% | 537,714 | 53.77% | -0.14 |
| nginx | 174,552 | 17.46% | 176,507 | 17.65% | 0.20 |
| Microsoft | 125,595 | 12.56% | 123,981 | 12.40% | -0.16 |
| 30,314 | 3.03% | 29,937 | 2.99% | -0.04 |