April 2015 Web Server Survey
In the April 2015 survey we received responses from 849,027,856 sites and 5,228,046 web-facing computers. Despite the sustained decline in the total number of sites, the number of web-facing computers has continued to grow, increasing by over 35,000 this month.
This month's loss of web sites was felt by each major web server vendor; however, some were hit harder than others. Microsoft once again suffered the largest loss (9.2 million web sites), followed by Apache (3.9 million) and nginx (917,000). Despite both Apache and Microsoft's shrinking numbers of sites, Apache's lead over Microsoft grew by one percentage point, to more than 11%.
Nginx continues to be the only major vendor consistently increasing in market share amongst the million busiest sites, gaining over 2,000 sites this month. It is now used by 21.43% of the top million sites, 9 percentage points more than Microsoft. Apache remains resilient, keeping its number-1 position with 49.19% of the top million sites, but continues its slow decline after losing nearly 1,600 sites.
The total number of web-facing computers found increased by more than 35,000 this month, with the growth split mostly between nginx and Apache, which gained 19,000 and 17,000 computers each. After a gain of 23,000 computers last month, Microsoft IIS gained only 804 computers, resuming its long-term decline in market share.
This month, there were a total of 433 new gTLDs with at least one website, 23 more than in March. The new gTLDs are now used by 1.5% of all sites seen in the survey. The largest increase was seen in .property which grew by more than 35,000 sites, overtaking the plural TLD .properties which has just under 10,000 sites. The new .property sites are mostly short premium domain names which have been registered for some time, and have now started advertising themselves for sale.
The decision by the ICANN New gTLD Program Committee to allow both plural and singular forms of the same word has been a controversial one, the Governmental Advisory Committee recommended reviewing it, but "after careful consideration" ICANN decided that no changes were needed in order to address the potential consumer confusion. The decision should, however, lead to increased competition, with .property being run by Uniregistry, Corp while .properties is run by Donuts Inc.
Developer | March 2015 | Percent | April 2015 | Percent | Change |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Apache | 337,175,536 | 38.39% | 333,285,741 | 39.25% | 0.87 |
Microsoft | 245,496,533 | 27.95% | 236,288,843 | 27.83% | -0.12 |
nginx | 127,191,696 | 14.48% | 126,274,778 | 14.87% | 0.39 |
20,097,702 | 2.29% | 20,051,433 | 2.36% | 0.07 |
Posted by Netcraft on 20th April, 2015 in Web Server Survey