November 2020 Web Server Survey

In the November 2020 survey we received responses from 1,229,948,224 sites across 263,787,870 unique domains and 10,564,577 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 24.2 million sites and 115,000 computers, but a loss of 310,000 domains.

Apache now powers 28.9% of the world’s top million websites, where its presence has grown by 6,431 sites since last month. This has increased its lead over its closest competitor, nginx, which lost 2,563 sites from the top million and is now 3.72 percentage points behind Apache’s leading share.

nginx continues to dominate in terms of web-facing computers, where its total rose by 88,700 to 3.67 million (+2.48%) computers and its share has grown by 0.47 percentage points to 34.7%. Although Apache gained 24,400 computers this month, its own share has now fallen to less than a third.

nginx also maintains its lead in two other metrics, with a total of 414 million sites (33.7% share) and 79.8 million domains (30.3%), while Apache still has the largest share of active sites (25.9%).

The number of domains powered by Microsoft web server suffered another noticeable fall this month, dropping by 473,000 to 19.1 million (-2.41%), reducing its share to 7.25%. Some of this decline is still being driven by GoDaddy’s parked domains being moved to OpenResty web servers.

More than 36 million unique domains are served by OpenResty, making it the third most commonly used server by that metric, and putting it over 15 million domains ahead of Cloudflare. OpenResty is a scalable web platform based on NGINX and LuaJIT, which is a just-in-time compiler for the Lua language.

Some of the most commonly visited websites powered by OpenResty include Tumblr, Firefox Monitor, Basecamp and a few adult video sites. The 36.6 million domains powered by OpenResty are served from just 81,900 computers.

Other vendor and hosting news

• nginx 1.19.5 mainline was released on 24 November.
• NGINX Unit 1.21.0 was released on 19 November.
• Apache Tomcat 7.0.107, 8.5.60, 9.0.40 and 10.0.0.M10 were released on 17 November.
• OpenLiteSpeed 1.7.6 was released on 9 November, followed by OpenLiteSpeed 1.6.18 Stable on 24 November.
• Microsoft claims it will become the first major cloud provider to track hourly energy consumption and renewable energy matching in a commercial product using the Vattenfall 24/7 Matching solution for its new datacenter regions in Sweden, which will be available next year.
• DigitalOcean has introduced storage-optimized Droplets with NVMe SSDs, and reduced the price of its memory-optimized Droplets.
• Dozens of apps, websites and other online services including Coinbase, Flickr, Roku and The Washington Post were affected by an outage at Amazon’s us-east-1 geographic region on 25 November.

Developer	October 2020	Percent	November 2020	Percent	Change
nginx	412,851,940	34.24%	414,338,895	33.69%	-0.55
Apache	326,050,973	27.04%	329,384,399	26.78%	-0.26
Microsoft	92,405,675	7.66%	97,283,716	7.91%	0.25
Google	46,583,411	3.86%	45,597,737	3.71%	-0.16

Developer	October 2020	Percent	November 2020	Percent	Change
Apache	50,837,005	25.66%	50,128,182	25.86%	0.19
nginx	38,606,507	19.49%	38,361,336	19.79%	0.30
Google	19,978,491	10.08%	18,643,717	9.62%	-0.47
Microsoft	7,716,026	3.89%	7,611,479	3.93%	0.03

For more information see Active Sites

Developer	October 2020	Percent	November 2020	Percent	Change
Apache	282,798	28.28%	289,229	28.92%	0.64
nginx	254,530	25.45%	251,967	25.20%	-0.26
Microsoft	71,983	7.20%	72,656	7.27%	0.07
LiteSpeed	22,199	2.22%	23,217	2.32%	0.10

Developer	October 2020	Percent	November 2020	Percent	Change
nginx	3,577,128	34.23%	3,665,862	34.70%	0.47
Apache	3,490,546	33.40%	3,514,947	33.27%	-0.13
Microsoft	1,543,860	14.77%	1,506,313	14.26%	-0.52

Developer	October 2020	Percent	November 2020	Percent	Change
nginx	79,895,960	30.25%	79,843,914	30.27%	0.02
Apache	69,649,769	26.37%	69,758,527	26.44%	0.07
Microsoft	19,604,847	7.42%	19,131,672	7.25%	-0.17
Google	2,436,537	0.92%	2,293,934	0.87%	-0.05