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Apache retains perch atop global web server market

Microsoft goes OVER A CLIFF

Microsoft Internet Information Server's (IIS') tilt for the title of the planet's most-prevalent web server has ended, with Apache well and truly back of top of Netcraft's survey.

IIS took the web server crown last year, when measrued by active hostnames, largely thanks to Chinese linkfarms running up oodles of servers as part of trends that saw Microsoft identified as the power behind the throne of over 200 million new identifiable hostnames. But IIS didn't score many new active websites, an anomaly that led Netcraft to observe that Apache remained the fastest-growing and most-used web server when one counts functioning websites.

The company's first data emission for 2015 confirms that trend. Here's the comparison of December 2014 and January 2015 data.

Developer December 2014 Percent January 2015 Percent Change
Apache 358,159,405 39.11% 348,460,753 39.74% 0.63
Microsoft 272,967,294 29.81% 241,276,347 27.52% -2.29
nginx 132,467,763 14.47% 128,083,920 14.61% 0.14
Google 20,011,260 2.19% 20,209,649 2.30% 0.12

And here's a nicely longitudinal look at market share.

Netcraft web server survey January 2015

Netcraft thinks some of IIS' dip is due to Windows Server 2003 boxes switching off: if that's the case there's hardly a rush to upgrade as just 6,200 active sites moved off IIS in the last month. Nginx lost 11,000 at Russian social network V Kontake alone, as the firm appears to be making a migration to Apache. Among other trends Netcraft has spotted of late is the arrival of “thousands” of sites using the recently-released .click, .restaurant, .help, .property, .top, .gifts, .quebec, .market and .ooo global top-level domains. It's also noted that growth of the new .ovh domain has slowed, an unsurprising result as there's now a price on the namespace after 50,000 were given away and another 10,000 sold for 99 Euro cents before the price rose to €2.99. ®

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