In the February 2014 survey we received responses from 920,102,079
sites — over 58 million more than last month.
Microsoft gained a staggering 48 million sites this month, increasing its total by 19% — most of this growth is attributable to new sites hosted by
Nobis Technology Group. Along with Microsoft, nginx also made a large gain of 14 million sites, whereas Apache fell by 7 million. Unsurprisingly, these changes have had a dramatic effect on the overall market share of each web server vendor, with Microsoft’s share growing by 3.38 percentage points to 32.8% (302 million sites) while Apache’s has fallen by 3.41 to 38.2% (352 million sites).
Microsoft’s market share is now only 5.4 percentage points lower than Apache’s, which is the closest it has ever been. If recent trends continue, Microsoft could overtake Apache within the next few months, ending Apache’s 17+ year reign as the most common web server. Apache is faring much better in both the active sites and top million sites datasets, however, where it is still dominating with just over half of the market share in both metrics.
Nearly 2% of the top million websites are now being served by CloudFlare’s customised version of nginx (cloudflare-nginx), which it uses to serve web content via its globally distributed
CDN edge nodes. This month’s survey saw more than a thousand of the top million sites migrate to cloudflare-nginx from other web server software, including
pizzahut.co.uk,
pet-supermarket.co.uk, the
image server used by the popular Cheezburger network of blogs, and the official
PRINCE2 website which switched from Microsoft IIS 6.0 running on Windows Server 2003.
Overall, nginx powers 17.5% of the top million sites, including popular overclocking forum
www.overclock.net, despite its server headers declaring that it is now using Microsoft IIS 4.1. Responses from the server also include an X-Powered-By header which claims the application is running on Visual Basic 2.0 on Rails (Visual Basic 2.0 is a long-deprecated language which was released more than 20 years ago, while Microsoft IIS 4.1 never actually existed). The server claimed to be running nginx during Netcraft’s previous survey, and indeed, it exhibits characteristics which suggest it is still using nginx.
The number of sites using the .pw country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) grew by more than half this month, reaching 10M sites in total. This ccTLD is assigned to Palau, but the .pw registry has branded the domain as
the Professional Web and allows domains to be registered by the general public, regardless of which country they are in. 97% of this month’s new .pw sites are hosted in the US (87% at Nobis Technology Group alone), and 2.7 million of them are running on Windows.
The busiest .pw domain is the single-letter u.pw, which is used by viral social media site
Upworthy. Other than that, the ccTLD remains relatively obscure, with less than 0.02% of the top million sites using .pw domains, while other single-letter domains have been sold for the modest sums of
$8,000 each. Only two single-letter .pw domains actually appear within the top million sites, and there are no two-letter domains at all. Last year, Symantec noted an
increase in spam messages containing URLs with .pw TLDs, and .pw later became the first TLD to adopt the
Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) rights protection mechanism.
Version 1.0 of the URS Technical Requirements were published by ICANN in October 2013, and are intended to make it faster and cheaper for trademark holders to seek resolution when there are obvious cases of infringement. URS is intended to complement rather than replace the existing Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP).
| Developer | January 2014 | Percent | February 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 358,669,012 | 41.64% | 351,700,572 | 38.22% | -3.41 |
| Microsoft | 253,438,493 | 29.42% | 301,781,997 | 32.80% | 3.38 |
| nginx | 124,052,996 | 14.40% | 138,056,444 | 15.00% | 0.60 |
| 21,280,639 | 2.47% | 21,129,509 | 2.30% | -0.17 |
| Developer | January 2014 | Percent | February 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 98,129,017 | 54.50% | 94,741,928 | 52.68% | -1.81 |
| nginx | 21,548,550 | 11.97% | 24,206,737 | 13.46% | 1.49 |
| Microsoft | 20,901,626 | 11.61% | 21,196,966 | 11.79% | 0.18 |
| 15,386,518 | 8.54% | 15,245,912 | 8.48% | -0.07 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | January 2014 | Percent | February 2014 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 554,533 | 55.45% | 539,129 | 53.91% | -1.54 |
| nginx | 159,079 | 15.91% | 174,552 | 17.46% | 1.55 |
| Microsoft | 126,568 | 12.66% | 125,595 | 12.56% | -0.10 |
| 30,370 | 3.04% | 30,314 | 3.03% | -0.01 |
