September 2023 Web Server Survey

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September 29, 2023

September 29, 2023

September 29, 2023

In the September 2023 survey we received responses from 1,085,035,470 sites across 254,776,456 domains and 12,274,854 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 8.7 million sites and 682,961 domains, but a gain of 112,383 web-facing computers.

OpenResty saw a large loss this month, dropping by 13.3 million sites (-13.99%) and 1.9 million domains (-4.78%). It now accounts for 7.55% of sites and 15.04% of domains seen by Netcraft, down from October by 1.16pp and 0.71pp respectively. This change is also reflected in its usage in the top 1 million sites, where it lost 528 sites (-5.19%).

Google gained 1.9 million sites (+3.34%) and 725,253 domains (+26.43%). This increase gives it a 5.28% share of sites – up from 5.07% (+0.21pp) – and a 1.36% share of domains, which is up from 1.07% (+0.29pp).

nginx further increased its lead in share of computers and active sites, with a gain of 76,227 computers taking it to 39.42% (+0.26pp), and a gain of 30,879 active sites giving it a 18.63% share (+0.11pp). This is despite it losing 5.0 million sites (-1.93%) and 455,426 domains (-0.80%). Combined, this suggests that sites using nginx to host duplicate sites, parked domains, and other machine-generated content have reduced in number, with more sites using it to host unique content.

The inverse is true for Apache, with it gaining 2.1 million sites (+0.93%) and 396,091 domains (+0.68%), but losing 231,789 active sites (-0.57%) and 11,749 computers (-0.37%). Additionally, Apache lost 1,881 sites in the top 1 million, reducing its share to 20.49% (-0.19pp).

Vendor news

  • Apache Tomcat version 10.1.13 was released on August 23rd.

  • njs, the scripting language used to extend nginx, released version 0.8.1 on September 12th.

  • AWS announced general availability of Apple M2 Pro Mac Mini EC2 instances.

  • AWS received approval for building 5 new data centers in New Albany, Ohio as part of its first stage of an estimated $7.8 billion investment into expanding its presence in Ohio.

  • Akamai announced new compute regions to open during September and October in Amsterdam, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Miami, Florida, Milan, Osaka and São Paulo.

  • Google opened a new cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg.

  • Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Fonts, allowing Google Fonts to be served by Cloudflare’s network on the customer’s own domain, while automatically rewriting mentions in code. It will be available to customers in October.

    • In the September 2023 survey, 25.7 million out of 204.8 million sites scanned (12.5%) were using Google Fonts.

  • Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Trace, a tool for analyzing the full journey of each HTTP request through the numerous products Cloudflare offers.

graph01_202309_00: Total number of websitesgraph02_202309_00: Web server market share

Developer

August 2023

Percent

September 2023

Percent

Change

nginx

259,187,743

23.70%

254,196,148

23.43%

-0.27

Apache

228,121,898

20.86%

230,237,389

21.22%

0.36

Cloudflare

118,391,275

10.82%

115,640,533

10.66%

-0.17

OpenResty

95,236,092

8.71%

81,915,322

7.55%

-1.16



graph03_202309_00: Web server market share for active sites

Developer

August 2023

Percent

September 2023

Percent

Change

Apache

40,880,916

20.36%

40,649,127

20.35%

-0.01

nginx

37,182,741

18.52%

37,213,620

18.63%

0.11

Cloudflare

23,781,740

11.85%

23,863,776

11.94%

0.10

Google

19,790,685

9.86%

20,024,387

10.02%

0.17

For more information see Active Sites.

graph04_202309_00: Web server market share for top million busiest sites

Developer

August 2023

Percent

September 2023

Percent

Change

Cloudflare

220,134

22.01%

220,596

22.06%

0.05

nginx

208,602

20.86%

207,828

20.78%

-0.08

Apache

206,784

20.68%

204,903

20.49%

-0.19

Microsoft

48,900

4.89%

48,510

4.85%

-0.04

graph05_202309_00: Web server market share for computers

Developer

August 2023

Percent

September 2023

Percent

Change

nginx

4,763,036

39.16%

4,839,263

39.42%

0.26

Apache

3,214,582

26.43%

3,202,833

26.09%

-0.34

Microsoft

1,183,567

9.73%

1,206,967

9.83%

0.10

graph06_202309_00: Web server market share for domains

Developer

August 2023

Percent

September 2023

Percent

Change

Apache

58,488,423

22.90%

58,884,514

23.11%

0.22

nginx

56,665,884

22.18%

56,210,458

22.06%

-0.12

OpenResty

40,244,506

15.75%

38,319,226

15.04%

-0.71

Cloudflare

25,182,588

9.86%

24,950,210

9.79%

-0.06

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