In the October 2013 survey we received responses from 767,234,152 sites, an increase of 28.2M.
Apache experienced another significant loss, 1.8M hostnames, and saw its market share drop to 45% — the lowest it has been for over 15 years. The last time Apache’s market share stood at 45% was in January 1998, at which time it served 830k hostnames.
Despite gaining 18M new sites this month, 16M sites previously served by Apache no longer exist and a further 4M sites have moved to other web servers, including 1.5M sites to nginx and 420k sites to Microsoft. This loss was also seen in the SSL survey in which Apache lost 5.8k sites, but it continues to be the largest web server with 43% of the SSL market.
Microsoft saw the largest growth, gaining a net 16.5M hostnames. In May, it seemed inevitable that nginx would shortly match Microsoft in the number of sites served — there was just a single percentage point separating them. Microsoft’s growth has since accelerated however, and Microsoft now stand almost 5 percentage points above nginx. The next version of Microsoft’s web server, IIS/8.5, has now been released to MSDN and TechNet subscribers ahead of the public release on the 18th October.
More than 600 sites are already served by IIS/8.5, up 60% over last month.
Nginx gained 11.4M hostnames overall this month. Included in this was a net gain of 1.5M hostnames from Apache and a net loss of 340k hostnames to Microsoft. Among the top million, nginx gained 4.4k hostnames and the server is used by 15% of the top million sites.
All major server vendors suffered losses in the active sites metric resulting in a net decrease of 780k active sites, 664k of which belongs to Apache. In June 2000, when Netcraft started measuring active sites, 44% of sites were deemed active.
The gap between the number of hostnames and active sites has been steadily increasing, and now the number of active sites account for less than a quarter of all sites.
ICANN signed 30 registry agreements for new top level domains in September.
New gTLDs added this month include .reviews and .technology.
General availability for domain registration of new gTLDs will begin in early 2014.
The last new TLD to be seen in the wild is .post, a sponsored TLD first seen in October 2012. There were just 4 .post domains seen in the survey this month.
| Developer | September 2013 | Percent | October 2013 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 346,288,706 | 46.86% | 344,408,387 | 44.89% | -1.97 |
| Microsoft | 160,691,763 | 21.74% | 177,216,296 | 23.10% | 1.35 |
| nginx | 111,680,078 | 15.11% | 123,114,800 | 16.05% | 0.93 |
| 34,806,502 | 4.71% | 34,127,482 | 4.45% | -0.26 |
| Developer | September 2013 | Percent | October 2013 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 99,354,736 | 52.30% | 98,646,225 | 52.14% | -0.16 |
| nginx | 24,426,727 | 12.86% | 24,255,815 | 12.82% | -0.04 |
| 22,527,229 | 11.86% | 22,146,345 | 11.71% | -0.15 | |
| Microsoft | 20,177,662 | 10.62% | 20,119,180 | 10.64% | 0.01 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | September 2013 | Percent | October 2013 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 569,628 | 56.96% | 565,711 | 56.57% | -0.39 |
| nginx | 146,401 | 14.64% | 150,843 | 15.08% | 0.44 |
| Microsoft | 131,326 | 13.13% | 129,269 | 12.93% | -0.21 |
| 31,902 | 3.19% | 32,038 | 3.20% | 0.01 |