In the April 2019 survey we received responses from 1,445,266,139 sites across 233,886,577 unique domain names and 8,613,630 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 16.8 million sites, but a gain of 1.72 million domains and 87,000 computers.

Most websites now use nginx!

Despite the overall loss of sites this month, nginx gained 22.3 million websites and 2.03 million additional active sites. nginx also gained the largest number of web-facing computers, increasing its total by 63,000 to 2.57 million (+2.52%). nginx's market share of web-facing computers is now nearly 30%, and this is continuing to grow steadily closer to Apache's leading share of 37.3%.

Microsoft and Apache lost shares in every headline metric this month, with both vendors contributing significantly to this month's overall loss of sites. Microsoft lost 18.9 million sites, while Apache lost 17.2 million, causing their shares to decrease by 1.01 and 0.87 percentage points.

These changes have pushed nginx into the lead, giving it a 27.5% share of all sites in Netcraft's April 2019 Web Server Survey. Significantly, this is the first time since 1996 that a vendor other than Microsoft or Apache has served the largest number of websites.

The reign of "a patchy" web server

If we cast our minds back to early 1996 (not long before the arrest of the Unabomber and the release of the Spice Girls' first cassette tape single), the most commonly used web server software was still NCSA HTTPd. This long-since discontinued web server was originally developed three years earlier by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; but when he left the NCSA in mid-1994, development stalled, prompting many webmasters to develop their own extensions and bug fixes.

A small group of these developers coordinated their changes in the form of patches, eventually leading to the foundation of the independent Apache Group. By April 1995, the group had made its first official public release of the Apache web server (version 0.6.2), which was based on NCSA HTTPd 1.3.

Although the NCSA resumed development of its own web server around the same time, Apache quickly took hold of the market. Exactly a year after Apache's first public release, Netcraft's April 1996 Web Server Survey showed that Apache had succeeded in overtaking NCSA's lead, marking the start of a remarkable uninterrupted 18-year reign.

The non-profit Apache Software Foundation, was later formed in 1999, and today is home to hundreds of other projects in addition to the Apache HTTP Server. Microsoft briefly took the lead from Apache in 2014, and retook the lead from 2016 until being beaten by nginx this month.

However, for now, Apache remains on top of every other headline metric: It leads with a 30.3% share of active sites, 37.3% of all web-facing computers, 31.5% of all domains, and it serves 32.2% of the top million websites. Nonetheless, nginx's strong and consistent growth makes it look set to challenge Apache's lead within a year or two. Most noticeably, it is rapidly catching up with Apache's declining share of web-facing computers, and may also soon threaten Apache's share of the top million websites.

New web server releases

There have been several new releases over the past month:

Apache 2.4.39 was released on 1 April. As usual, this latest release in the 2.4.x stable branch is regarded by the Apache Software Foundation to be the best available version; but more importantly, it resolves several security issues including an access control bypass and privilege escalation vulnerability.

nginx 1.15.10 mainline was released on 26 March, adding some new directives and certificate features. This was followed by two bugfix releases: nginx 1.15.11 on 9 April, and nginx 1.15.12 on 16 April.

njs 0.3.1 (the JavaScript-like scripting language that allows nginx functionality to be extended) was released on 16 April, adding several new features, including support for arrow functions.

OpenLiteSpeed 1.4.46 was released on 5 April, adding support for PHP7 and app servers that use nodeJS, Python and Ruby.

Taobao's Tengine 2.3.0 was released on 25 March. This development version of the open source nginx fork inherits all features from nginx 1.15.9 and includes several new features, changes and bugfixes.

Tengine Aserver

Visible uptake of the latest Tengine 2.3.0 development version is likely to be slow. The most commonly used numbered version is still 2.2.0, despite there being four newer development versions since its release more than three years ago; and development version 1.4.2, which was released in 2012, is not far behind.

Tengine 2.2.0 is currently used by 13.9% of all Tengine-powered websites, but the majority – 42.4% – do not reveal a version number at all, and a further 29.8% respond with the Tengine/Aserver server header. Nearly all of the websites that use Tengine Aserver are online stores hosted on subdomains of taobao.com and the domain of its parent company, alibaba.com, suggesting that it is a custom version designed specifically for these applications.

Development versions of Tengine appear to be far more popular than stable releases. The most recent stable version, Tengine 2.1.2, was released in December 2015 and is used by only 0.26% of all Tengine-powered websites.









Developer March 2019 Percent April 2019 Percent Change nginx 375,431,606 25.68% 397,728,889 27.52% 1.84 Apache 403,603,745 27.61% 386,380,893 26.73% -0.87 Microsoft 381,017,776 26.06% 362,109,196 25.05% -1.01 Google 24,809,682 1.70% 25,956,080 1.80% 0.10





Developer March 2019 Percent April 2019 Percent Change Apache 56,236,608 31.01% 55,982,911 30.30% -0.71 nginx 36,268,792 20.00% 38,293,931 20.73% 0.73 Google 14,953,818 8.25% 14,801,433 8.01% -0.23 Microsoft 11,254,841 6.21% 11,298,492 6.12% -0.09

For more information see Active Sites





Developer March 2019 Percent April 2019 Percent Change Apache 325,237 32.52% 322,376 32.24% -0.29 nginx 262,032 26.20% 262,220 26.22% 0.02 Microsoft 88,181 8.82% 86,118 8.61% -0.21 LiteSpeed 16,536 1.65% 17,068 1.71% 0.05





Developer March 2019 Percent April 2019 Percent Change Apache 3,194,650 37.47% 3,213,815 37.31% -0.16 nginx 2,506,320 29.39% 2,569,379 29.83% 0.44 Microsoft 1,563,823 18.34% 1,554,282 18.04% -0.30



