February 2016 Web Server Survey

In the February 2016 survey from which we received responses 933 892 520 sights and 5,796,210 computers connected to the web.

Microsoft edged closer to Apache, with an increase of 16.1 million sites bringing its total by 6.14% to 279 million. Apache’s relatively modest growth of 0.66% put Microsoft within 3 percentage points of Apache’s leading market share of 32.8%.

In terms of web computers, Apache maintains a much clearer lead with a market share of 47.8%. Microsoft is also in second place by this metric, but with a share of more than 20 percentage points behind Apache. However, Apache and Microsoft have both suffered small market share losses as nginx continues to show strong growth: this month, nginx gained 21,100 computers, increasing its market share by 0.26 points to 13.96%.

nginx 1.9.11 mainline was released on February 9th. This release introduced support for dynamic modules, allowing selective loading of third-party modules and some native modules at runtime. In previous versions, nginx modules had to be statically linked into an nginx binary built from source, which caused the module to load every time, even if it wasn’t going to be used.

The latest version of Microsoft Internet Information Services, IIS 10.0, is still very rare in nature, as its main deployment platform (Windows Server 2016) has not yet been released. Fewer than 5,000 websites currently use IIS 10.0, and these are served either from Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview builds or from Windows 10 machines.

The latest technical preview version of Windows Server 2016 also supports a headless deployment option known as Nano Server. It is a simplified version of Windows Server, without GUI and few other features which are not essential for modern web applications. Therefore, it usually requires fewer updates to install and, therefore, fewer reboots as well.

Despite losing a small market share, Apache also showed a reasonable growth of 15,600 computers. Similar to last month, a significant portion of this growth is due to the appearance of more consumer Western Digital My Cloud storage devices.

The total number of My Cloud devices in the survey now stands at 583,400, up 68,400 from last month; however, the number of devices directly exposed to the internet only increased by 11,100.

Western Digital uses Amazon AWS to host servers that forward proxy requests to My Cloud devices in relay mode. Most of these relay servers have been configured to serve a few thousand devices each, and so the 331,000 devices currently using relay mode contribute to less than 200 computers in Apache’s total.

Interestingly, while most web-connected My Cloud devices are hosted in the United States, more than half of the *.wd2go.com hostnames used by relay servers are hosted in Amazon’s European regions.

Developer	January 2016	Percent	February 2016	Percent	Switch
apache	304 271 061	33.56%	306 292 557	32.80%	-0.76
Microsoft	262 471 886	28.95%	278 593 041	29.83%	0.88
nginx	141,443,630	15.60%	137,459,391	14.72%	-0.88
Google	20,799,087	2.29%	20,640,058	2.21%	-0.08

Market share of web servers for active sites

Developer	January 2016	Percent	February 2016	Percent	Switch
apache	84,965,001	49.90%	84 790 816	49.50%	-0.40
nginx	27,294,719	16.03%	27,327,583	15.95%	-0.08
Microsoft	17,088,509	10.04%	17,257,986	10.08%	0.04
Google	13,428,841	7.89%	13,596,295	7.94%	0.05