Brace yourself for an almighty burst of self-congratulation from Microsoft, which is poised to take the crown for the world's most-used Web server.

So says Netcraft's new monthly report on the state of the web, which offers the following data:

Developer May 2014 Percent June 2014 Percent Change Apache 366,262,346 37.56% 353,672,431 36.50% -1.05 Microsoft 325,854,054 33.41% 352,208,487 36.35% 2.94 nginx 142,426,538 14.60% 133,763,494 13.81% -0.80 Google 20,685,165 2.12% 20,192,595 2.08% -0.04

The news isn't all bad for Apache and other web servers, because the data above measures all web sites. When the firm considers “active” web servers (definition here), Apache continues to reign supreme with 51.43 per cent of the market, ahead of Nginx on 14.79 per cent and Microsoft's 11.49 per cent.

Those niceties won't stop Microsoft crowing when, as expected, it takes the overall web server title next month. If Internet Information Server (IS) does take the crown, it will have taken around 18 years to do so: IIS 1 was released as a free add-on to 1995's Windows NT 3.5.1 and was then baked into Windows NT 4 in 1996. It's been in Windows Server ever since.

If history repeats, we can expect Windows Phone to top the charts in about 2030. ®