In the December 2020 survey we received responses from 1,228,111,563 sites across 263,413,876 unique domains and 10,553,965 web-facing computers. The reflects a loss of 1.84 million sites, 374,000 domains, and 10,600 computers.
Overall, nginx lost the largest number of sites this month (-3.15 million), while Apache gained most (3.04 million); yet in terms of active sites, nginx gained 411,000, while Apache gained only 100,000.
Microsoft, Apache and nginx each suffered losses in their total number of domains, although nginx’s loss was small enough that its market share increased slightly. 30.3% of the world’s domains are now powered by nginx, compared with 26.4% powered by Apache. Despite losses affecting each major webserver vendor, the causes were independent in each case; for example nginx’s 34,000 loss resulting from a drop of 387,000 domains at Freenom.
OpenResty is continuing to show strong growth, with GoDaddy’s use of the web server for its parked domains. It now powers 71.3 million sites across 36.9 million domains and 84,680 web-facing computers.
The number of web-facing computers running nginx, Apache and Microsoft web server software also fell this month. The largest loss was 38,600 web-facing computers for nginx, which took its total down to 3.63 million and its share down by 0.33 percentage points to 34.4%, leaving it just over one percentage point ahead of Apache. Microsoft lost 14,700 computers, while Apache lost 5,820.
Improvements to the million busiest sites methodology has resulted in a number of market share movements. The biggest drop was seen for Apache, with its share down by 4.3 percentage points. Although it continues to lead this market with a share of 24.6%, nginx is now much closer behind with a 23.2% share of the top million, despite also experiencing a drop, and losing 2.0 percentage points. Cloudflare experienced the largest increase, up 1.4 percentage points to reach a 15.2% market share.
Other vendor and hosting news
- The first release candidate of Caddy 2.3 was announced on 12 December.
- nginx 1.19.6 mainline was released on 15 December. This version includes four bugfixes, including one for a bug that was introduced in the previous release, where a segmentation fault could have occurred when HTTPS was used.
- njs 0.5.0 was released on 1 December. This is the latest version of the JavaScript-based scripting language that can be used to extend nginx functionality.
- Apache Tomcat 7.0.107 was released on 23 November, followed by the releases of Tomcat 8.5.61, 9.0.41 and 10.0.0 (beta) on 8 December.
- OpenLiteSpeed 1.7.7 was released on 9 December.
- Microsoft has added new capabilities to its Azure Government cloud, expanded its Azure Government Secret cloud, and announced a new Azure Government Top Secret cloud to handle top secret classified data.
| Developer | November 2020 | Percent | December 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 414,338,895 | 33.69% | 411,191,213 | 33.48% | -0.21 |
| Apache | 329,384,399 | 26.78% | 332,420,092 | 27.07% | 0.29 |
| Microsoft | 97,283,716 | 7.91% | 97,532,495 | 7.94% | 0.03 |
| 45,597,737 | 3.71% | 46,924,883 | 3.82% | 0.11 |
| Developer | November 2020 | Percent | December 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 50,128,182 | 25.86% | 50,228,552 | 25.60% | -0.26 |
| nginx | 38,361,336 | 19.79% | 38,772,690 | 19.76% | -0.03 |
| 18,643,717 | 9.62% | 19,779,846 | 10.08% | 0.46 | |
| Microsoft | 7,611,479 | 3.93% | 7,597,989 | 3.87% | -0.05 |
For more information see Active Sites
| Developer | November 2020 | Percent | December 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 289,229 | 28.92% | 246,298 | 24.63% | -4.29 |
| nginx | 251,967 | 25.20% | 232,075 | 23.21% | -1.99 |
| Microsoft | 72,656 | 7.27% | 68,507 | 6.85% | -0.41 |
| LiteSpeed | 23,217 | 2.32% | 18,612 | 1.86% | -0.46 |
| Developer | November 2020 | Percent | December 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 3,665,862 | 34.70% | 3,627,249 | 34.37% | -0.33 |
| Apache | 3,514,947 | 33.27% | 3,509,126 | 33.25% | -0.02 |
| Microsoft | 1,506,313 | 14.26% | 1,491,587 | 14.13% | -0.13 |
| Developer | November 2020 | Percent | December 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 79,843,914 | 30.27% | 79,810,001 | 30.30% | 0.03 |
| Apache | 69,758,527 | 26.44% | 69,652,695 | 26.44% | -0.00 |
| Microsoft | 19,131,672 | 7.25% | 18,862,033 | 7.16% | -0.09 |
| 2,293,934 | 0.87% | 2,402,849 | 0.91% | 0.04 |
