March 2023 Web Server Survey

In the March 2023 survey we received responses from 1,116,018,952 sites across 269,281,081 domains and 12,106,182 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 11.6 million sites, 1.4 million domains, and 36,610 web-facing computers.

This month, for the first time, nginx overtook Apache within the top million busiest sites. nginx gained 1,447 sites, which increased its market share by 0.14pp to 21.37%, compared to Apache at 21.18% (-0.16pp). This allowed it to regain 2nd place, which it lost when Cloudflare overtook both to claim the top spot in January.

nginx was created by Igor Sysoev, with development starting in Spring 2002, and it first became publicly available in October 2004. It slowly gained popularity over the following years, largely due to its ability to handle a much large number of connections with a lower memory footprint compared to Apache. NGINX, Inc. was founded in 2011 to provide commercial support for nginx while maintaining the open source version. Igor left NGINX, Inc. at the start of 2022 after having worked on nginx for 20 years.

nginx first featured in the Web Server Survey in January 2008. When we started publishing our top million busiest sites metric in April 2009, nginx was already 3rd with a market share of 3.16% behind Microsoft (18.91%) and Apache (67.56%). It overtook Microsoft in May 2013 and remained in 2nd place until January this year. When looking at all the sites in the survey, not just the top million busiest sites, nginx overtook Apache to become the market leader in April 2019. It now has a market share of 25.94%, ahead of Apache (20.58%) and Cloudflare (10.17%).

Cloudflare made extensive use of nginx in its custom software stack for many years. However, it was slowly replaced by Cloudflare’s in-house technologies, reflected by it migrating its server banners from cloudflare-nginx to just cloudflare starting in December 2017, and it announced a complete replacement in-house HTTP proxy Pingora in September 2022.

Across the survey as a whole, Cloudflare saw a small loss of 296,120 sites (-0.26%), its first drop since April 2022. Despite this, its market share increased by 0.08pp to 10.17%. It saw a more significant loss of 1.1 million domains (-4.19%), reducing its market share for domains by 0.37pp to 9.58%.

LiteSpeed had the largest percentage growth in March: it grew by 814,945 sites (+1.39%) and 352,384 domains (+3.96%). It now has a market share of 5.33% sites and 3.43% domains, up by 0.13pp and 0.15pp respectively.

Apache suffered losses across the board this month, losing 1.4 million sites (-0.61%), 223,028 domains (-0.38%), and 32,965 web-facing computers (-1.00%). However, despite its losses, it now has a market share of 20.58% (+0.09pp) sites and 21.45% (+0.03pp) domains.

nginx also saw large losses in March, dropping by 6.2 million sites (-2.10%), 318,827 domains (-0.44%), and 7,456 web-facing computers (-0.16%). It now accounts for 25.94% of sites (-0.28pp) and 26.97% of domains (+0.03pp).

Similarly, OpenResty saw a significant loss of 6.6 million sites (-6.92%) and 237,667 domains (-0.61%). Its market share of sites dropped to 7.94% (-0.50pp), and its market share of domains dropped to 14.36% (-0.01pp).

Vendor news

• njs 0.7.10 and njs 0.7.11, the scripting language used to extend nginx, were released on 2nd February 2023 and 9th March 2023 with new features and bugfixes.
• Apache Tomcat versions 8.5.86, 9.0.72, 10.1.6, and 11.0.0-M3 were released in February, which contain bugfixes and documentation improvements.
• lighttpd 1.4.69 was released on 10th February 2023, including bugfixes and portability improvements.
• AWS announced that it is working on an AWS region in Malaysia.
• Azure announced a new planned datacenter region in Saudi Arabia (Saudi Arabia Central).

For more information see Active Sites