Netcraft News Wire

August 2020 Web Server Survey

In the August 2020 survey we received responses from 1,230,576,586 sites across 261,821,287 unique domains and 10,349,486 web-facing computers. This represents a loss of 3.65 million sites, but a gain of 1.16 million domains and 128,000 computers.

The number of web-facing computers using nginx increased by 83,000 this month, which means that - for the first time - nginx is in use by more web-facing computers than any other web server, including Apache. This is another milestone for nginx, and reflects its impressive growth in recent years.

Apache still serves more active sites than nginx, and a greater proportion of the top million busiest sites, but this month its decline in these metrics continued. One year ago, among the top million busiest sites, nginx trailed Apache’s market share by 6 percentage points. nginx has since halved this gap, and is now less than 3 percentage points behind. If the current trend continues, it won’t be long before nginx overtakes Apache in this area too.

As well as a marked decrease in total sites this month of 22.14 million (-15.8%), Microsoft also suffered in other metrics this month. The number of domains served using Microsoft software dropped by 8.27 million (-18.4%), and 19,000 fewer web-facing computers (-1.2%) are running Microsoft web servers. Microsoft also lost 633,000 active sites (-7.3%).

New vendor releases

Apache released three new versions of httpd this month. Version 2.4.44 fixed several bugs, version 2.4.45 dropped support for the abandoned HTTP2 Cache Digests proposal, and version 2.4.46 fixed three security vulnerabilities.

This month nginx released updates for three of its products. nginx 19.1.2 mainline was released on 11 August with a few minor optimizations and several bugfixes. On the same day, njs 0.4.3 was released, adding support for the querystring module. On 13 August nginx Unit 1.19.0 was released, which introduced several new features, improved performance, and fixed a number of bugs.

Total number of websites

Web server market share

DeveloperJuly 2020PercentAugust 2020PercentChange
nginx451,156,87836.55%448,602,80636.45%-0.10
Apache314,054,52325.45%318,307,24525.87%0.42
Microsoft140,264,33211.36%118,126,6629.60%-1.77
Google44,290,4303.59%44,326,2273.60%0.01

In the August 2020 survey we received responses from 1,230,576,586 sites across 261,821,287 unique domains and 10,349,486 web-facing computers. This represents a loss of 3.65 million sites, but a gain of 1.16 million domains and 128,000 computers.

The number of web-facing computers using nginx increased by 83,000 this month, which means that - for the first time - nginx is in use by more web-facing computers than any other web server, including Apache. This is another milestone for nginx, and reflects its impressive growth in recent years.

Apache still serves more active sites than nginx, and a greater proportion of the top million busiest sites, but this month its decline in these metrics continued. One year ago, among the top million busiest sites, nginx trailed Apache’s market share by 6 percentage points. nginx has since halved this gap, and is now less than 3 percentage points behind. If the current trend continues, it won’t be long before nginx overtakes Apache in this area too.

As well as a marked decrease in total sites this month of 22.14 million (-15.8%), Microsoft also suffered in other metrics this month. The number of domains served using Microsoft software dropped by 8.27 million (-18.4%), and 19,000 fewer web-facing computers (-1.2%) are running Microsoft web servers. Microsoft also lost 633,000 active sites (-7.3%).

New vendor releases

Apache released three new versions of httpd this month. Version 2.4.44 fixed several bugs, version 2.4.45 dropped support for the abandoned HTTP2 Cache Digests proposal, and version 2.4.46 fixed three security vulnerabilities.

This month nginx released updates for three of its products. nginx 19.1.2 mainline was released on 11 August with a few minor optimizations and several bugfixes. On the same day, njs 0.4.3 was released, adding support for the querystring module. On 13 August nginx Unit 1.19.0 was released, which introduced several new features, improved performance, and fixed a number of bugs.

Total number of websites

Web server market share

DeveloperJuly 2020PercentAugust 2020PercentChange
nginx451,156,87836.55%448,602,80636.45%-0.10
Apache314,054,52325.45%318,307,24525.87%0.42
Microsoft140,264,33211.36%118,126,6629.60%-1.77
Google44,290,4303.59%44,326,2273.60%0.01
Web server market share for active sites

DeveloperJuly 2020PercentAugust 2020PercentChange
Apache51,653,41626.98%50,966,41026.62%-0.37
nginx38,490,20120.11%37,794,33119.74%-0.37
Google18,700,3279.77%18,767,6509.80%0.03
Microsoft8,642,8774.51%8,009,7444.18%-0.33

For more information see Active Sites

Web server market share for top million busiest sites

DeveloperJuly 2020PercentAugust 2020PercentChange
Apache282,59628.26%280,15828.02%-0.24
nginx255,84325.58%257,47225.75%0.16
Microsoft73,5587.36%72,7877.28%-0.08
LiteSpeed19,5691.96%20,3482.03%0.08
Web server market share for computers

DeveloperJuly 2020PercentAugust 2020PercentChange
nginx3,445,83533.71%3,528,85834.10%0.39
Apache3,454,82233.80%3,474,32133.57%-0.23
Microsoft1,604,48415.70%1,585,58815.32%-0.38
Web server market share for domains

DeveloperJuly 2020PercentAugust 2020PercentChange
nginx77,637,04429.79%79,757,92930.46%0.68
Apache70,516,59027.05%70,197,13026.81%-0.24
Microsoft45,042,49817.28%36,772,58714.04%-3.24
Google2,388,9570.92%2,402,9790.92%0.00