June 2023 Web Server Survey

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June 30, 2023

June 30, 2023

June 30, 2023

In the June 2023 survey we received responses from 1,106,671,903 sites across 255,487,423 domains and 12,106,503 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 2.7 million sites, 16.0 million domains, and an increase of 69,309 web-facing computers.

Microsoft saw the largest gain of 8.7 million sites this month, with smaller gains of 211,862 domains (+3.03%) and 1,003 computers (+0.08%). Microsoft now accounts for 3.12% of sites (+0.79pp) and 2.82% of domains (+0.24pp) seen by Netcraft.

Cloudflare and OpenResty also saw significant growth this month, with Cloudflare gaining 4.8 million sites (+4.22%) and 35,435 domains (+0.14%), and OpenResty gaining 5.2 million sites (+6.01%) and 1.3 million domains (+3.30%).

nginx saw the largest loss of 19.5 million sites (-6.79%) and 16.1 million domains (-22.07%) this month. The loss was primarily driven by the loss of 27.2 million sites running nginx on top-level domains managed by Freenom (.cf, .ga, .gq, .ml and .tk). Freenom halted domain registrations earlier this year, after Meta filed a lawsuit against Freenom and accused it of not taking appropriate steps to respond to abuse reports. nginx now accounts for 24.2% of sites (-1.70pp) and 22.3% of domains (-4.63pp) seen by Netcraft.

Despite a loss of 474,070 domains (-0.80%), Apache now accounts for 23.04% of domains (+1.19pp) seen by Netcraft, overtaking nginx to reach first place in this metric for the first time since March 2020.

Within the top million busiest sites, Cloudflare, nginx, and Apache all saw small losses in market share. Cloudflare’s market share now stands at 22.05% (-0.02pp), nginx at 21.08% (-0.10pp), and Apache at 20.96% (-0.20pp). Amazon and Varnish saw the largest growth in the top million sites, gaining 3,859 and 2,101 sites respectively, bringing their market shares to 1.68% (+0.39pp) and 0.44% (+0.21pp).

.ga TLD returned to Gabonese management

.ga, the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Gabon, has been returned to Gabonese management under ANINF, the National Agency for Digital Infrastructure and Frequencies of the Gabonese Republic. ANINF made the decision due to the “failure of the company Freenom”, the previous registry. The technical migration was conducted between 4th June and 7th June, with assistance from Afnic, the French Network Information Centre. According to ANINF’s estimation, there are currently over 7 million domain names registered under .ga. However, Freenom has not provided data on “several million” of these domain names. Afnic stated that these would be deleted as part of the migration. In this month’s survey we saw 1.03 million web-facing domain names within the .ga TLD, an 80.6% decrease compared to 5.30 million domain names in May.

Vendor news

  • LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS) 6.1.2 was released on 24th May 2023, containing minor improvements and bug fixes.

  • lighttpd 1.4.71 was released on 27th May 2023. It separates HTTP/2 support into an optional mod_h2 module.

  • Apache Tomcat versions 8.5.90, 9.0.76, 10.1.10, and 11.0.0-M7 were released in June. These releases add support for virtual threads, update HTTP/2 to use the RFC-9218 prioritization scheme, deprecate the xssProtectionEnabled from HttpHeaderSecurityFilter, and update Tomcat Native.

  • nginx 1.25.1 was released on 13th June 2023. It includes changes to HTTP/2, removal of the deprecated “ssl” directive, and HTTP/3 bug fixes.

graph01_202306_00: Total number of websitesgraph02_202306_00: Web server market share

Developer

May 2023

Percent

June 2023

Percent

Change

nginx

286,842,351

25.86%

267,359,359

24.16%

-1.70

Apache

230,153,373

20.75%

228,606,589

20.66%

-0.09

Cloudflare

114,615,294

10.33%

119,448,329

10.79%

0.46

OpenResty

87,081,251

7.85%

92,312,550

8.34%

0.49



graph03_202306_00: Web server market share for active sites

Developer

May 2023

Percent

June 2023

Percent

Change

Apache

41,721,325

20.74%

41,442,462

20.53%

-0.21

nginx

39,239,562

19.51%

38,466,356

19.05%

-0.45

Cloudflare

22,946,279

11.41%

23,557,960

11.67%

0.26

Google

19,496,037

9.69%

19,836,206

9.82%

0.13

For more information see Active Sites.

graph04_202306_00: Web server market share for top million busiest sites

Developer

May 2023

Percent

June 2023

Percent

Change

Cloudflare

220,683

22.07%

220,466

22.05%

-0.02

nginx

211,823

21.18%

210,849

21.08%

-0.10

Apache

211,564

21.16%

209,570

20.96%

-0.20

Microsoft

51,808

5.18%

49,858

4.99%

-0.19

graph05_202306_00: Web server market share for computers

Developer

May 2023

Percent

June 2023

Percent

Change

nginx

4,666,219

38.77%

4,707,872

38.89%

0.12

Apache

3,225,842

26.80%

3,223,180

26.62%

-0.18

Microsoft

1,195,569

9.93%

1,196,572

9.88%

-0.05

graph06_202306_00: Web server market share for domains

Developer

May 2023

Percent

June 2023

Percent

Change

Apache

59,327,929

21.85%

58,853,859

23.04%

1.19

nginx

73,241,823

26.97%

57,080,863

22.34%

-4.63

OpenResty

38,092,858

14.03%

39,348,600

15.40%

1.37

Cloudflare

25,830,485

9.51%

25,865,920

10.12%

0.61

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