In the February 2021 survey we received responses from 1,204,252,411 sites across 263,042,054 unique domains and 10,766,606 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 6,270,052 sites, 92,829 domains, and 116,789 computers.

nginx is top of the charts when it comes to total count of sites as well as number of unique domains and web-facing computers. 34.5% of all sites run on nginx, 30.4% of domains, and 35.0% of web-facing computers. Apache comes in at second place in these metrics, with a 26.3% market share of sites, a similar 26.4% share of domains, and 32.7% of web-facing computers.

In terms of domains, OpenResty and Cloudflare come in at third and fourth place to make up an additional 14.4% and 7.1% of the market respectively. OpenResty is a web application server that is built upon the technology of nginx, but, strictly speaking, is not an nginx fork. Cloudflare historically based their server stack around nginx, but transitioned towards using more in-house developed technologies over time. As of this month, these web server vendors are tracked individually in the monthly Web Server Survey charts.

Although nginx leads the wider market, Apache still has a small lead when it comes to the top one million busiest sites, with a 25.6% market share – 2.4pp ahead of nginx. Apache increased its share of the top million by 0.54pp in February. Although OpenResty takes a sizable chunk of the wider market, it is not nearly as common amongst the top million, taking only a 1.6% share. This disparity can be explained through GoDaddy's extensive use of OpenResty for domain parking.

Apache also holds a more significant lead in terms of Netcraft's active sites metric, which favours sites with unique content. Apache serves 25.5% of active sites, whereas nginx serves 19.8%. Google accounts for a reasonably large 9.9% share of active sites, owing to its popular Blogger service.

Microsoft's server software market share remains in decline. Microsoft's figures took a significant drop in 2020 in favour of OpenResty, and Microsoft now only has 6.5% (-1.0pp) of the site market and 6.0% (-0.3pp) of domains as of February 2021. OpenResty also looks set to overtake Microsoft as the third largest vendor in terms of sites and active sites.

Other vendor and hosting news

Nginx has pushed out its first product updates for 2021 – nginx version 1.19.7 and NGINX Unit 1.22.0. Lighttpd also released version 1.4.59 of its web server, which now enables HTTP version 2 by default.

For more information see Active Sites