Netcraft released the February 2013 web server survey, which saw responses from 630,795,511 sites.
Web analytics firm Netcraft released the February 2013 web server survey where it received responses from 630,795,511 sites.
The report follows Netcraft’s December 2012 web server survey, which noted the discovery of a new rootkit that infects web servers running on 64-bit GNU/Linux.
This month saw a significant decline in the number of sites that use Apache and Microsoft IIS, with the two servers seeing a combined loss of more than five million hostnames.
On the other hand, nginx saw an 12.85 percent increase in market share in January with 1.4 million more hostnames than December.
The large gain in hostnames positions nginx as one of the most popular web servers, putting it within less than 500 individual sites as Microsoft IIS, which also has just under 13 percent of market share.
Tengine, an nginx derivative maintained by Chinese e-tailer Taobao, is now used on almost 4 million hostnames.
Meanwhile, Taobao’s parent company, Alibaba, has the second largest number of hostnames in China, claiming more than 11 percent of the hostnames in China.
Though China accounts for 19 percent of the world’s population, only 5.8 percent of the world’s websites are hosted in China.
Microsoft continues to lead China with 38 percent of Chinese-hosted sites using IIS, followed by 26 percent using Apache, and 1 percent using nginx, which is significantly above-average.
In the report, Netcraft also notes that Taobao attracts the second highest number of phishing attacks behind Facebook.
The web analytics company is currently blocking nearly six thousand URLs targeting Taobao customers.
Earlier this month, Netcraft released its “Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites” report for December 2012, which sees Serverstack as the most reliable hosting company site during December.
Talk back: Do you think nginx will eventually surpass Microsoft IIS in market share? Which of these web servers are your customers using most? Let us know in the comments section.
About Justin Lee
Justin Lee has been a staff analyst with theWHIR since 2004. He writes about a range of web hosting and IT-related issues facing the industry on the WHIR website, as well the print version of the WHIR magazine. Follow him on Twitter @Justin_theWHIR.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Nginx didn’t see a 12.85% “increase in market share”, it’s market share increase *TO* 12.85% from 12.64% – a 1.66% increase.
Also, Microsoft IIS has a 16.59% market share, *NOT* “just under 13 percent”. The 12.86% figure which I believe you are referring to with this status is for the 1 million busiest sites, not overall market share.