In the October 2020 survey, we received responses from 1,205,797,275 websites on 264,098,084 unique domains and 10,449,223 web computers. This equates to a gain of 9.50 million hostnames and 111,000 computers but a loss of 187,000 domains.
nginx saw the greatest growth in domains and computers with web contact, where it is the leader with a total of 79.9 million domains and 3.58 million computers, accounting for 30.2% and 34.2% respectively. However, nginx’s growth has been outperformed by Google in terms of active websites. Google gained 1.31 million active websites compared to 1.06 million from nginx. That growth makes Google the only major player to see its market share of active websites growing to just over 10% this month. Despite a decrease of 0.79 percentage points, Apache remains at the top with a share of 25.7% in active locations.
Unlike its strong growth in other metrics, nginx saw the biggest drop in its presence among the top million websites. 3,030 fewer websites reduced their share to 25.5%, while Apache continues to lead at 28.3%.
Other notable changes this month include an 8.10% reduction in the number of domains served by Microsoft web servers, which fell 1.73 million to 19.6 million. Much of this was caused by continuing to migrate GoDaddy parked domains that were migrated from GoDaddy’s own hosting infrastructure to OpenResty servers in Google Cloud. This resulted in the number of OpenResty domains increasing by 1.92 million to 36.4 million. The only market Microsoft increased its share in was within the top million websites, which gained 319 additional websites to reach a 7.20% share.
DigitalOcean App Platform
DigitalOcean stepped into Platform as a Service (PaaS) with the launch of its new App Platform product, which can be used to build, deploy and scale web applications and static websites. It is a fully managed service based on DigitalOcean Kubernetes and other open standards that offers much of the flexibility of Kubernetes without the complexity involved.
Competing with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Oracle Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure App Service, DigitalOcean App Platform offers a starter pricing tier that customers can use to familiarize themselves with the platform by providing up to three static sites for free while dynamic apps are available built and deployed from $ 5 / month. App Platform supports several popular languages and application frameworks out of the box, including PHP, Docker, Go, Node.js, Python, and Ruby.
All price tiers – including the free – include the global delivery of content via Cloudflare. This means that applications deployed on the App Platform are likely to count towards the number of websites hosted by Cloudflare in future Netcraft surveys.
New server versions
nginx 1.19.3 was released on September 29th. This release in the major release branch contains several bug fixes, some new instructions and a new ngx_stream_set_module that can be used to set variables in Nginx configuration files.
njs 0.4.4 was also released on September 29th. This version of the scripting language with Nginx extension includes a new buffer object as well as several other new features and bug fixes. NGINX Unit 1.20.0 was later released on October 8th, introducing various new features, bug fixes, and support for ASGI 3.0.
Apache Tomcat 8.5.59, Tomcat 9.0.39, and Tomcat 10.0.0-M9 were released on October 9th. Tomcat 10.0.0-M9 is considered a milestone as it moves from Java EE to Jakarta EE after transferring Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. Apache has provided a tool that will automatically convert existing Java EE 8 projects running on Tomcat 9 to Jakarta EE 9 projects running on this latest version of Tomcat 10.
| developer | September 2020 | percent | October 2020 | percent | change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nginx | 407,086,442 | 34.03% | 412.851.940 | 34.24% | 0.21 |
| Apache | 330,682,809 | 27.64% | 326.050.973 | 27.04% | -0.60 |
| Microsoft | 95,944,600 | 8.02% | 92,405,675 | 7.66% | -0.36 |
| 45,689,961 | 3.82% | 46,583,411 | 3.86% | 0.04 |
| developer | September 2020 | percent | October 2020 | percent | change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 50,925,159 | 26.46% | 50.837.005 | 25.66% | -0.79 |
| Nginx | 37,549,911 | 19.51% | 38,606,507 | 19.49% | -0.02 |
| 18,663,687 | 9.70% | 19,978,491 | 10.08% | 0.39 | |
| Microsoft | 7,861,906 | 4.08% | 7,716,026 | 3.89% | -0.19 |
For more information, see Active Sites
| developer | September 2020 | percent | October 2020 | percent | change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 280,949 | 28.09% | 282.798 | 28.28% | 0.18 |
| Nginx | 257,562 | 25.76% | 254,530 | 25.45% | -0.30 |
| Microsoft | 71.664 | 7.17% | 71,983 | 7.20% | 0.03 |
| LiteSpeed | 21,341 | 2.13% | 22,199 | 2.22% | 0.09 |
| developer | September 2020 | percent | October 2020 | percent | change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nginx | 3,531,550 | 34.16% | 3,577,128 | 34.23% | 0.07 |
| Apache | 3,493,422 | 33.79% | 3,490,546 | 33.40% | -0.39 |
| Microsoft | 1,535,962 | 14.86% | 1,543,860 | 14.77% | -0.08 |
| developer | September 2020 | percent | October 2020 | percent | change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nginx | 79,534,471 | 30.09% | 79.895.960 | 30.25% | 0.16 |
| Apache | 70,646,497 | 26.73% | 69,649,769 | 26.37% | -0.36 |
| Microsoft | 21,331,946 | 8.07% | 19,604,847 | 7.42% | -0.65 |
| 2,387,975 | 0.90% | 2,436,537 | 0.92% | 0.02 |
