In the January 2013 survey we received responses from 629,939,191 sites.
Apache continued its decline in market share that began in mid-2012, now having 100 million fewer hostnames than in June 2012: it still retains a clear majority at 55.26% of the market. Both within the million busiest sites and on the internet as a whole, nginx has continued its ascendance, increasing its market share to 12.77% and 12.64% respectively. Where the version is known, the widest deployed version of nginx is the current stable branch (1.2.x) but the bulk of Apache users are still using the 2.2.x branch of Apache httpd despite the new features available in the 2.4.x branch which has been available since February 2012.
Amazon now hosts 9.3 million hostnames using their cloud computing platforms — gaining more than one million sites this month, and more than doubling within the past year. The most used web server at Amazon is nginx, being used on more than 44% of all hostnames, many of which are being served by Heroku, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider.
Notwithstanding Amazon’s fast growth, Go Daddy hosts 36 million sites — nearly 6% of the world’s websites — making it the largest hosting company in terms of hostnames. The number of sites hosted does not, however, necessarily scale with the number of computers (physical or virtual) used to serve the corresponding content: shared hosting providers will often be able to host several hundred or even thousand sites from a single machine, whereas VPS and dedicated hosting providers may only serve a few. Although Netcraft found 23k web-facing computers at Go Daddy, Amazon has been the largest hosting company in terms of web-facing computers since September 2012 with 139k web-facing computers this month — Go Daddy hosts, on average, more than 23 times more sites per web-facing computer than Amazon. Although Go Daddy is the largest hosting company by hostname, the distribution of sites hosted is skewed towards the less busy: it hosts 2.6% of the million busiest sites, and only a single site in the top 1,000. Amazon, on the other hand, hosts a similar number in the million busiest, and 5.1% of the top 1,000 sites.
Almost two-thirds of the web-facing computers at Go Daddy run Microsoft Windows, with the vast majority running Windows server 2008. With such a high proportion of Windows-powered websites, Go Daddy, unsurprisingly, hosts the largest number of sites powered by ASP.NET. More than 24 million sites hosted by Go Daddy were actively using ASP.NET, whereas relatively few (2.4 million) were using the otherwise popular PHP scripting language.
| Developer | December 2012 | Percent | January 2013 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 352,951,511 | 55.70% | 348,119,032 | 55.26% | -0.43 |
| Microsoft | 111,570,010 | 17.61% | 106,619,177 | 16.93% | -0.68 |
| nginx | 76,460,756 | 12.07% | 79,640,472 | 12.64% | 0.58 |
| 21,870,614 | 3.45% | 22,573,858 | 3.58% | 0.13 |
| Developer | December 2012 | Percent | January 2013 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 103,128,107 | 55.47% | 103,682,570 | 55.50% | 0.03 |
| nginx | 21,993,817 | 11.83% | 22,227,083 | 11.90% | 0.07 |
| Microsoft | 21,224,672 | 11.42% | 21,211,254 | 11.35% | -0.06 |
| 14,837,660 | 7.98% | 15,022,947 | 8.04% | 0.06 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | December 2012 | Percent | January 2013 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 586,594 | 59.04% | 583,143 | 58.69% | -0.34 |
| Microsoft | 131,344 | 13.22% | 131,830 | 13.27% | 0.05 |
| nginx | 123,593 | 12.44% | 126,909 | 12.77% | 0.33 |
| 20,700 | 2.08% | 19,879 | 2.00% | -0.08 |
