Netcraft graph of market share for top servers across the million busiest sites
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — With major players Apache and Microsoft’s IIS dominating the web server market with a combined share of nearly 80 percent, the rise of open source developer NGINX (www.nginx.org) to become the third most popular web server is certainly intriguing.
Last month, the company saw its largest gain with just over 1.6 million active sites and now has a 8.53 percent share, according to Netcraft web server survey.
In fact, if the open source developer continues to grow at its current rate, it could eventually take over Microsoft to have the second largest number of active sites.
Today, NGINX powers over 40 million domains on the Internet, and over 20 percent of the top 1,000 busiest websites.
With its recently announced investment of $3 million, a new San Francisco headquarters opening in the fourth quarter, and the upcoming release of its commercial-grade connection processing and optimization software platform, NGINX is set for continued growth and success.
In an email interview, Andrey Alexeev, business development and marketing at NGINX discusses the new web server, the company’s strategy, and walking the fine line between open source and commercial availability.
WHIR: Can you explain further what NGINX’s strategy is regarding the web server?
Andrey Alexeev: NGINX is a strong advocate of the model of providing quality open source software. The project will continue to develop under 2-clause BSD license. The features of NGINX – including not only HTTP server functionality, but also proxying, load distribution, caching, bandwidth policing and media streaming – are continuously and consistently improving. With regards to the development of web server components, we will address the question of an easier upgrade path from the legacy infrastructures to NGINX. This is beneficial for hosting providers and SMBs, which are still utilizing a number of inefficient historical configurations. Some of the related modifications to the code would include the necessary support for distributed configuration files and closer integration with embedded interpreters.
The next versions of the product will extend NGINX’s core with a number of important new mechanisms related to handling I/O from network and storage and provide flexible configuration management and improved API. To put it simply, we will take the performance and scalability of NGINX to yet another level, strengthening its core advantages with long-awaited functionality. NGINX is a logical and sensible upgrade option for modern companies in a variety of market areas, especially companies that are looking for consistently and efficiency but do not currently use NGINX.
WHIR: How does it differ from other web servers?
AA: It is an interesting question. NGINX outperforms legacy web servers by delivering exponentially better performance, scalability and security. It has quickly become the fastest-growing web server in the world with a market share of 8.5 percent, according to the most recent Netcraft survey. NGINX is able to continuously take more connections while retaining compact memory and CPU footprint. NGINX’s flexible combination of features essential to building a modern web infrastructure is what makes it so popular. What is remarkable about using NGINX in different setups is that you can utilize its features as standalone, enabling mechanisms or you can mix and match for optimal performance and scalability. For example, to instantly offload serving concurrent connections, you can put NGINX as a reverse web or mail proxy in front of your busy back-end servers. By combining various NGINX features you can achieve extreme performance for static content and videos, conserve server and network resources by caching repetitive content, handle concurrent connections with ultimate efficiency, offload your back-end infrastructure from unnecessary tasks, securely integrate your applications servers using a number of interfaces and protocols, and more.
With regard to its field-proven architecture, NGINX doesn’t try to outthink a well-engineered modern operating system when handling the network and disk load with ultimate efficiency in memory and CPU. NGINX leverages performance-enabling mechanisms available with all of the major OS platforms. Using event notifications and asynchronous handling of a variety of consequent actions associated with accepting, processing and managing network connections and content retrieval, NGINX provides “hints” to the operating system and gets timely feedback on when to expect inbound or outbound traffic, when to check disk operation, when to refresh content and so on. The NGINX configuration is logical and flexible and allows more dynamics and less hassle in day-to-day engineering operations. NGINX’s flexible and extremely efficient utilization of hardware resources dramatically improves not just performance and scalability, but also provides more density and a “greener” computing environment.
WHIR: What are NGINX’s plans for creating a commercial product?
AA: NGINX will focus on the development of an accelerated front-end software solution for distributing, serving and managing high traffic loads, optimizing delivery of different types of content and enabling better security and performance for cloud and enterprise server infrastructure. There are a number of companies stuck with legacy hardware solutions and underperforming proprietary software that will find NGINX a good alternative. Highly efficient front-end configurations have been our core competence for the past 10 years. Our plans include a commercial-grade software package for use with the modern generic server hardware that would help dynamic companies grow and develop their front-end infrastructure in a timely matter without wasting resources unnecessarily. For hosting and cloud service providers, NGINX will release options to upgrade their web installations to modern and efficient high-density web server software. Some of the options here would include advanced performance management and security-related features. We’re currently engaged in establishing business partnerships with vendors and developers in the US, Europe and Asia, and will announce our first commercial products in the Q3 2012.
WHIR: What is the company’s product strategy? Will you be establishing a US presence?
AA: The new company will open its San Francisco HQ office during Q4 2011. The staff in the US will be responsible for marketing, product management and sales strategy, and operations. The engineering team will remain in Moscow, Russia.
WHIR: How does the company plan on straddling the fine line between open source and commercial availability?
AA: This is achievable. We’ve been enjoying a huge and gratifying level of support from our users and we will continue to focus strongly on making them happier. We’re now in the process of revamping product documentation, support procedures and development cycle. Since we became a company we’ve already made significant progress here. The NGINX “open core” version will continue to be distributed as free, open source software under a 2-clause BSD license. We will be introducing new functionality requested by the users as well as continuously improving the quality of the software. By developing a parallel commercial offering, we can provide exciting new infrastructure solutions for Internet companies in a variety of markets, including enterprise, CDN, hosting and cloud service providers, media and entertainment, and more. Many companies that have used NGINX for years are now looking into having commercial-grade extensions for the product, such as advanced management tools and extended high-availability solutions. We can also provide competitive products with important performance-enabling mechanisms based on NGINX open core to help modern Internet businesses launch and grow without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
WHIR: When do you expect to roll out the product in beta and for official release?
AA: We are officially launching the company on October 11, 2011. Tentatively, you can expect to see beta versions of the products in Q2 or Q3 2012. We will give you more information, when we have it.
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