September 2020 Web Server Survey

In the September 2020 survey we received responses from 1,196,298,727 sites, across 264,284,761 unique domains and 10,338,585 web-facing computers. Compared with last month, this is a loss of 34,277,859 sites and 10,901 web-facing computers, but a gain of 2,463,474 unique domains.

Approximately 15 million domains have switched from Microsoft web server software to OpenResty, a web server which adds LuaJIT support to nginx. This represents a 5.97 percentage point drop in Microsoft’s market share of domains, and, accordingly, a 6.71 percentage point increase for OpenResty. OpenResty now powers 34.5 million domains, giving it a 13% market share and gaining it third place behind nginx and Apache. This huge swing is driven by GoDaddy migrating its customers’ parked domains from GoDaddy’s own hosting infrastructure to Google Cloud.

Microsoft also experienced a large loss of 49,600 web-facing computers (-3.1%), unrelated to the GoDaddy OpenResty migration. The largest increase in web-facing computers was seen for Apache (+19,100), though this was not enough to re-take the lead from nginx, which became the largest web server vendor by this metric last month.

Most of the large vendors saw drops in terms of the number of active sites hosted this month. Cloudflare and LiteSpeed are among the vendors who saw growth in this area despite the overall negative trend. Pepyaka (used by Wix) and Squarespace also both gained active sites (+3.0% and +2.6% respectively), reflecting the growing popularity of website builders.

New vendor releases

This month LiteSpeed released version 5.4.9 of the LiteSpeed Web Server. A small number of new features have been added in this update, including automatic CloudFlare CDN IP detection and support for bcrypt password hashes when using HTTP authentication.

Apache have released three new versions of Tomcat this month – 8.5.58, 9.0.38 and 10.0.0-M8. These releases each add a number of new features and security patches. Notable changes include adding support for the Expect HTTP header, and adding support for setting read and write idle timeouts on websocket connections.

Apache also released version 8.1.0 of Apache Traffic Server. This release focused on improving the stability, reliability and performance of the server’s HTTP/2 support.

Developer	August 2020	Percent	September 2020	Percent	Change
nginx	448,602,806	36.45%	407,086,442	34.03%	-2.43
Apache	318,307,245	25.87%	330,682,809	27.64%	1.78
Microsoft	118,126,662	9.60%	95,944,600	8.02%	-1.58
Google	44,326,227	3.60%	45,689,961	3.82%	0.22

Developer	August 2020	Percent	September 2020	Percent	Change
Apache	50,966,410	26.62%	50,925,159	26.46%	-0.16
nginx	37,794,331	19.74%	37,549,911	19.51%	-0.23
Google	18,767,650	9.80%	18,663,687	9.70%	-0.11
Microsoft	8,009,744	4.18%	7,861,906	4.08%	-0.10

For more information see Active Sites

Developer	August 2020	Percent	September 2020	Percent	Change
Apache	280,158	28.02%	280,949	28.09%	0.08
nginx	257,472	25.75%	257,562	25.76%	0.01
Microsoft	72,787	7.28%	71,664	7.17%	-0.11
LiteSpeed	20,348	2.03%	21,341	2.13%	0.10

Developer	August 2020	Percent	September 2020	Percent	Change
nginx	3,528,858	34.10%	3,531,550	34.16%	0.06
Apache	3,474,321	33.57%	3,493,422	33.79%	0.22
Microsoft	1,585,588	15.32%	1,535,962	14.86%	-0.46

Developer	August 2020	Percent	September 2020	Percent	Change
nginx	79,757,929	30.46%	79,534,471	30.09%	-0.37
Apache	70,197,130	26.81%	70,646,497	26.73%	-0.08
Microsoft	36,772,587	14.04%	21,331,946	8.07%	-5.97
Google	2,402,979	0.92%	2,387,975	0.90%	-0.01