In the March 2023 survey, we received responses from 1,116,018,952 sites across 269,281,081 domains and 12,106,182 computers with web access. This reflects a loss of 11.6 million sites, 1.4 million domains and 36,610 computers with Internet access.
This month, for the first time, nginx surpassed Apache in the million busiest sites. nginx gained 1,447 sites, increasing its market share by 0.14 percentage points to 21.37%, compared to Apache by 21.18% (-0.16 percentage points). This allowed it to reclaim second place, which it lost when Cloudflare edged out both to claim the top spot in January.
nginx was created by Igor Sysoev, with development beginning in the spring of 2002, and first made publicly available in October 2004. It slowly gained popularity over the following years, largely due to its ability to handle a large number of of connections with less memory. footprint compared to Apache. NGINX, Inc. was founded in 2011 to provide commercial support for nginx while maintaining the open source version. Igor left NGINX, Inc. in early 2022 after working on nginx for 20 years.
nginx first appeared in the Web Server Survey in January 2008. When we began publishing our million busiest sites metric in April 2009, nginx was already in third place with a 3.16% market share. behind Microsoft (18.91%) and Apache (67.56%). It overtook Microsoft in May 2013 and remained in second place until January of this year. Looking at all sites in the survey, not just the top 1 million sites, nginx overtook Apache to become the market leader in April 2019. It now has a 25.94% market share, ahead of Apache ( 20.58%) and Cloudflare (10.17%).
Cloudflare made extensive use of nginx in its custom software stack for many years. However, it was slowly replaced by Cloudflare’s internal technologies, reflected in migrating its server banners from cloudflare-nginx to cloudflare-only starting in December 2017, and announced a complete replacement of Pingora’s internal HTTP proxy. in September 2022.
In the survey as a whole, Cloudflare experienced a small loss of 296,120 sites (-0.26%), its first drop since April 2022. Despite this, its market share rose 0.08pp to 10, 17%. It saw a more significant loss of 1.1 million domains (-4.19%), reducing its domain market share by 0.37pp to 9.58%.
LiteSpeed had the highest percentage growth in March: it grew by 814,945 sites (+1.39%) and 352,384 domains (+3.96%). It now has a market share of 5.33% for sites and 3.43% for domains, an increase of 0.13 pp and 0.15 pp respectively.
Apache suffered losses across the board this month, losing 1.4 million sites (-0.61%), 223,028 domains (-0.38%), and 32,965 web-facing computers (-1.00%) . However, despite its losses, it now has a market share of 20.58% (+0.09 pp) for sites and 21.45% (+0.03 pp) for domains.
nginx also experienced heavy losses in March, with a drop of 6.2 million sites (-2.10%), 318,827 domains (-0.44%), and 7,456 computers with web access (-0.16%) ). Now it represents 25.94% of the sites (-0.28pp) and 26.97% of the domains (+0.03pp).
Similarly, OpenResty experienced a significant loss of 6.6 million sites (-6.92%) and 237,667 domains (-0.61%). Its sites market share decreased to 7.94% (-0.50 pp) and its domains market share decreased to 14.36% (-0.01 pp).
Supplier News
njs 0.7.10 and njs 0.7.11, the scripting language used to extend nginx, were released on February 2, 2023 and March 9, 2023 with new features and bug fixes. Apache Tomcat versions 8.5.86, 9.0.72, 10.1.6, and 11.0.0-M3 were released in February and contain bug fixes and documentation improvements. lighttpd 1.4.69 was released on February 10, 2023, including bug fixes and portability improvements. AWS announced that it is working on an AWS Region in Malaysia. Azure announced a new planned data center region in Saudi Arabia (Central Saudi Arabia).
Developer Feb 2023 Percentage Mar 2023 Percent Change nginx 295,723,793 26.23% 289,510,060 25.94% -0.28 Apache 231,042,423 20.49% 229,628,183 20.58% 0.09 Cloudflare 1 13,829, 1 98 10.09% 113,533,078 10.17% 0.08 OpenResty 95,176,082 8.44% 88,587,110 7.94% -0.50
Developer Feb 2023 Percentage Mar 2023 Percent Change Apache 41,819,892 20.70% 41,297,783 20.52% -0.18 nginx 38,997,703 19.30% 38,122,247 18.94% -0.36 Cloudflare 22 557 491 11 0.17% 22,785,563 11.32% 0.15 Google 20,549,494 10.17% 19,904,123 9.89% -0.28
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Developer Feb 2023 Percent Mar 2023 Percent Change Cloudflare 217,075 21.71% 216,170 21.62% -0.09 nginx 212,268 21.23% 213,715 21.37% 0.14 Apache 213,396 21.34% 21 1,839 21 0.18 % -0.16 Microsoft 52,414 5.24% 51,501 5.15% -0.09
Developer Feb 2023 Percentage Mar 2023 Percent Change nginx 4,701,104 38.72% 4,693,648 38.77% 0.06 Apache 3,302,887 27.20% 3,269,922 27.01% -0.19 Microsoft 1,242. 076 10.23% 1,228,232 10.15% -0.08
Developer Feb 2023 Percentage Mar 2023 Percent Change nginx 72,949,802 26.95% 72,630,975 26.97% 0.03 Apache 57,991,600 21.42% 57,768,572 21.45% 0.03 OpenResty 38.91 2,294 1 4.37% 38,674,627 14.36% -0.01 Cloudflare 26,925,061 9.95% 25,796,120 9.58% -0.37