January 2023 Web Server Survey

In the January 2023 survey we received responses from 1,132,268,801 sites across 270,967,923 unique domains, and 12,156,700 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 6,894,269 sites, but a loss of 270,799 domains and 77,725 computers.

Within the top million busiest sites, Cloudflare has jumped from 3rd to 1st place — overtaking both Apache and nginx in a single month — its market share increased by 0.56pp and now stands at 21.64%. Along with Apache (21.40%) and nginx (21.20%), the top three web servers power almost two-thirds of the top million busiest sites.

Cloudflare’s journey to the top of the million busiest sites metric began in the February 2021 Web Server Survey, when we started tracking it separately from nginx to reflect Cloudflare’s extensive use of in-house technologies. At the time of this split, Cloudflare was already the third most used within the top million busiest sites, having overtaken Microsoft in March 2019. In September 2022, Cloudflare announced its replacement of nginx with Pingora, a new in-house HTTP proxy.

Cloudflare was founded in 2009 and launched publicly in 2010. Its core service is a content delivery network which sits between end-users and websites, providing increased performance by caching content and using optimised routes across the Internet.

It grew quickly, with its core service available for free and with generous bandwidth limits. In 2014 it launched Universal SSL, providing free access to HTTPS for sites using Cloudflare. The company went public in 2019. It has mitigated some of the largest denial-of-service attacks ever observed on the Internet: most recently a 2.5 Tbps attack targeting a server for the video game Minecraft in 2022.

However, its growth has not been without controversies. Its content neutrality policy has been criticised, with it providing service to cybercriminals and sites containing hate speech and far-right content. In 2017 a buffer overflow in Cloudflare’s code caused private information from a small percentage of requests, such as authentication tokens, to be leaked.

In recent years, Cloudflare’s offering has expanded and it now competes with cloud computing giants Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in areas such as serverless computing, object storage and managed databases.

Cloudflare has also seen sustained growth in other metrics in January: across all sites, Cloudflare saw the largest growth, with an increase of 9.3 million sites (+9.07%) and 473,405 domains (+1.82%).

Google had the second largest growth amongst all sites, with a gain of 0.33 million sites (+0.63%), 37,483 domains (+1.46%). OpenResty saw a decrease of 419,469 sites (-0.45%) and 571,662 domains (-1.45%), but an increase of 8,608 computers (+4.83%).

nginx saw growth in sites and domains for the first time since August 2022, with an increase of 311,521 sites (+0.11%) and 527,542 domains (+0.79%), but still lost 23,344 computers (-0.49%). Apache saw a decrease across all metrics, losing 1.9 million sites (-0.81%), 900,956 domains (-1.52%) and 51,758 computers (-1.53%).

Vendor News

• Apache Tomcat versions 9.0.70 and 10.1.4 were released in December, which contain bugfixes and documentation improvements.
• LiteSpeed Web Server 6.1 was released on 9th January 2023. The LiteSpeed Web Server 6.1 stream introduces support for the PROXY protocol. This is the first stable release for this version stream; it includes various improvements and fixes since the previous release candidate.
• lighttpd 1.4.68 was released on 3rd January 2022, including strengthened defaults for TLS, various bugfixes and removal of some deprecated features.
• nginx 1.23.3 was released on 13th December 2022, containing bugfixes.
• Oracle opened a new cloud region in Chicago on 15th December 2022.

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