In the July 2020 survey we received responses from 1,234,228,567 sites across 260,658,118 unique domains and 10,221,919 web-facing computers. This represents a gain of 9.47 million sites and 180,000 computers, but a loss of 1.75 million domains.

Most of the major server vendors saw gains in total sites this month: Apache gained 9.8 million sites after a loss of roughly the same size last month, while Microsoft and nginx gained 5.4 million and 2.5 million sites respectively. LiteSpeed continued to see strong growth, gaining 1.95 million new sites this month. Although it makes up 2.17% of the market, this represents strong growth from 1.62% at the start of the year.

nginx showed the highest growth in terms of domains, gaining 200,000. Losses of 1.1 million domains for Microsoft and 998,000 for Apache have further boosted nginx’s lead in this metric, and it now stands around 30 million domains ahead with a 29.8% (+0.27 pp) market share.

nginx also showed the highest growth in web-facing computers, with an increase of 97,000 taking its total to 3.5 million and leaving it just 9,000 computers (0.09 pp of market share) shy of Apache, the current leader. Apache has consistently had the highest number of web-facing computers since Netcraft began tracking the metric in 2007, but has slowly been losing market share – primarily to nginx. Microsoft trails in third position with a total of 1.6 million web-facing computers, around half that of nginx and Apache.

New vendor releases

LiteSpeed announced the first release candidate of LiteSpeed Web Server 6.0 on 17 July. This release brings several major new features such as support for conditionals in Apache configuration files, asynchronous execution of the mod_security Web Application Firewall, and sandboxed execution environments for PHP and CGI scripts. It also adds support for the latest HTTP/3 specification, draft 29. LiteSpeed has historically been fast to adopt new draft versions of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, often implementing support within a month of a new draft’s release.

nginx 1.19.1 mainline was announced on 7 July with a few minor changes and bugfixes – mainline being the release stream which receives new feature updates. Alongside this, nginx released version 0.4.2 of njs, a custom subset of JavaScript which allows nginx’s functionality to be extended. This release adds new regular expression and filesystem methods to the language, in addition to bugfixes.

Total number of websites

Web server market share

Developer June 2020 Percent July 2020 Percent Change
nginx 448,673,487 36.63% 451,156,878 36.55% -0.08
Apache 304,288,405 24.84% 314,054,523 25.45% 0.60
Microsoft 134,874,928 11.01% 140,264,332 11.36% 0.35
Google 43,449,240 3.55% 44,290,430 3.59% 0.04
Web server market share for active sites

Developer June 2020 Percent July 2020 Percent Change
Apache 51,602,586 27.27% 51,653,416 26.98% -0.28
nginx 37,118,879 19.61% 38,490,201 20.11% 0.49
Google 19,315,421 10.21% 18,700,327 9.77% -0.44
Microsoft 8,551,282 4.52% 8,642,877 4.51% -0.00

For more information see Active Sites

Web server market share for top million busiest sites

Developer June 2020 Percent July 2020 Percent Change
Apache 284,849 28.48% 282,596 28.26% -0.23
nginx 254,281 25.43% 255,843 25.58% 0.16
Microsoft 74,007 7.40% 73,558 7.36% -0.04
LiteSpeed 19,194 1.92% 19,569 1.96% 0.04
Web server market share for computers

Developer June 2020 Percent July 2020 Percent Change
Apache 3,423,193 34.09% 3,454,822 33.80% -0.29
nginx 3,347,179 33.33% 3,445,835 33.71% 0.38
Microsoft 1,605,287 15.99% 1,604,484 15.70% -0.29
Web server market share for domains

Developer June 2020 Percent July 2020 Percent Change
nginx 77,436,626 29.51% 77,637,044 29.79% 0.27
Apache 71,514,159 27.25% 70,516,590 27.05% -0.20
Microsoft 46,133,117 17.58% 45,042,498 17.28% -0.30
Google 2,279,759 0.87% 2,388,957 0.92% 0.05

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