I love statistics. They can be used to say just about whatever one desires.

The goal of the post seems to be to show relevance and traction gains in the market. The charts from netcraft that discuss all domains are pointless for that, because domains are a dime a dozen. What we should pay attention to are the numbers across the busiest sites.

First, is a million sites a good measure? Netcraft has identified just over 180 million websites, so the million busiest sites seems a pretty good assessment. To be useful, we need to see how nginx fares in the market of websites where these decisions count. So, the busiest million sites is a good measure for that.

Of the four servers identified (Google App Engine is a toy, shouldn't be on this list), nginx is the only one that actually made quantifiable gains in the two months compared. Both Apache and Microsoft/IIS took steps back. In this consideration, nginx sits at 8% share, which is essentially "statistically relevant". But even then, it's only one month of data. A longer term view is more relevant.

Back in April (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/04/06/april-2011-web-...), nginx was measured in the same context at 6.5% of these same sites; half a year later, nginx sits at 8%.

Here's the summary: nginx is making relevant market share gains in the web server space, and is taking share from both Microsoft/IIS and Apache.

I don't think they are referring to Google App Engine specifically, but all servers from Google running their own custom http server (where the http response header for Server = "gws"). That's pretty significant, considering how much traffic Google servers get.

> Google App Engine is a toy

Compared to what? Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but last time I checked building fault-tolerant, arbitrarily scalable distributed systems was still pretty hard.

Compared to other web servers that don't put programmatic limitations or restrictions in place?

I wonder how many websites use nginx as a web server instead of simply as a reverse proxy server.

What nginx really needs is something like WAMP or MAMP to really spur adoption. I suspect lot of beginner web developers use Apache and MySQL because they're both installed by default on hosting providers. On Windows, you can't beat one-click WAMP installs.

beginning web developers don't run their own servers. they might run wamp on a local test machine, but everybody deploys to cheap shared hosts where they don't have a choice of server.

I don't know (or particularly care) what my personal site is running on. i pay dreamhost a couple bucks and they take care of all that boring stuff for me.

You don't need to run your own server to have a choice. Running a VPS with root access is cheap these days. Even on a shared server to still have choice (at least IIS vs Apache).

Of course, you also have a choice not to care, but then you probably don't do any server side programming.

I agree. I'm a beginner and have used Apache because it's just what comes with everything. My non-toy sites always use Apache as I know I'm less prone to trouble because of my experience with it.

I do have a VPS account with Webbynode which lets you run several Linux flavors, and a choice of nix, apache, or node which is cool but still scary for someone like me who is comfortable with the command line on my own file system but a little shaky when SSH-img into my VPS.

This might sound dumb, but I'm a server newbie. What I've always wondered is why anyone would use IIS at all? It seems like all MS products make you jump through hoops to do simple things that work on Apache ad others with just a click or simple command. It's been a while since I've experienced it so I wish I could point to so,etching more solid but I remember a few years back having to install PHP on IIS with MySQL and it was a pain plus not everything worked by default and there was just a lot of hoops to jump through just to get a simple CRUD app online. What does IIS offer that others don't?

Also, why does most enterprise software get built with ASP and .NET? I'm in a CIS program in college and they're all about teaching us Microsoft technologies and I can't stand it because I feel like I'll be using languages, frameworks, and other tech that's open for the most part in real world situations (I don't plan to be a corporate programmer, I'm already in business for myself). Please excuse my ignorance, I really do just wonder, I could be thinking totally backwards here.

It depends on your clients and/or the work you're doing. On the server-side, I do almost entirely ASP.NET work for small and medium business. Much of that is public-facing and you wouldn't know it was .NET unless you viewed the source and looked pretty closely. You certainly can build drab, enterprisey software with ASP.NET (or any other language), but you can also build sites like Stack Overflow just as easily.

Trying to host an ASP.NET 4/MVC3 site on Apache would be a nightmare. So, for the same reason you might tend to avoid IIS for your PHP work, .NET developers will prefer IIS for their work.

As for why so much "enterprise" software is written in languages like C# and Java, I believe it has a lot to do with those companies having very large teams with high turnover. Static languages (and their tooling) do have some compelling advantages in that situation.

I think the statistics are entirely irrelevant now -- if they were ever relevant in the first place.

Almost everything serious runs behind some sort of proxy, and those proxies often front for heterogeneous back-end systems, and even those back-ends might offload some of their logic to other systems.

There are too many interweaved layers in complex web services, and too many parts that can be (and routinely are) put together in too many different ways. The identity of the front-end is interesting only in a rather attenuated sense, and it can usually be trivially swapped out for another.

I recently hosted my SAAS on Linode nginx (https://www.wireframes.org)

Linode has stack scripts for the LEMP stack (linode uses "E" for the njinx). I agree there should be similar stack for windows to increase adoption

> linode uses "E" for the njinx

Apparently, nginx is meant to be pronounced "engine x."

I wonder how accurate this is in some ways. Yes, Nginx is powering the web, but what about all those corporate servers behind firewalls running (custom) .NET or Java apps. Those aren't measured at all.

I think IIS in many ways is a different market...

It would also be interesting to know how many of those IIS sites are just companies Outlook Web Access and MS Terminal Services gateways. Lots of things will serve you some HTML over port 80 that aren't what we think of as "web sites".

Yes -- the vast majority of IIS implementations are run behind corporate firewalls -- they won't show up in surveys like this. These stats don't show web server popularity, they show the popularity of public web servers.

Even public is debatable, many web application servers or servers requiring accounts likely won't be hit. The percentage of all HTTP requests that are to servers they measure will likely be pretty low.

Very good observation. Netcraft is not measuring internal corporate servers. It can only measure what it can reach -- publicly accessible domains.

Would be interesting to know just how many of those exist.

Whats with the near-vertical growth of hostnames in 2011?

likely a change in the way netcraft counts things. i remember looking at some other netcraft graph with a similar jump, and after some research i found that it was because they decided to count every single blog on a chinese blogging service as a separate hostname. similar to counting every [username].tumblr.com as a separate host.

In terms of the top sites using nginx they saw a big gain this week -

http://trends.builtwith.com/Web-Server/nginx

Whilst IIS7 is gaining market share it's as the expense of IIS in general losing market share.

Nginx's share actually went down, just MS's share went down more.

Apache is the real winner here.

Yes, there are several ways to look at these statistics. You could also say:

Microsofts total number of active sites increased by more than Nginx's.

Or:

Relative to their totals, Nginx's number of active sites increased by more than Microsofts.

I think it will be interesting to see nginx push IIS into third place. I hope it manages to take some of Apaches share too. I'm a big user of Apache, but I'd like to see some more competition up there.

Misleading headline, its still 7% short in total servers polled.

I prefer the description "100% accurate" to "misleading".

If I'd have used "Market Share" instead of "Active Site Market Share", you might have had a point.

Would you have prefered this title? ...

"Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share and within 7% of Server Number Market Share"

One could also read it as "IIS requires 7% more servers to run 1% more websites than nginx". Hmm... Sounds like a potential blog post...

It is within 1% across all sites. Across large sites it's 7%.

Question; how does netcraft determine what web-server serves a particular domain? Most big sites hide those details in http headers, so how do they tell?

...Read the HTTP headers? I think you answered your own question.

I think GP meant that they hide that info even in their headers, such that you can't just see what's in Server:.

As @maw said, most top sites remove the http headers that identify the web-server. Also, if you had to take the top, I don't know, 10k sites by traffic, I would imagine all of them use a load-balancer, so how can netcraft know what the web-server is behind them?

Top sites? I think probably a few of these would quality:

CNN.com — Server: nginx

Netflix.com — Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1

YouTube.com — Server: Apache

Wikipedia.com — Server: Apache

Twitter.com — Server: tfe

LinkedIn.com — Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1

Granted, this does not give you a good picture of their network topology, but in general they do report something that Netcraft can use.

Right. The version is often stripped out, but the server software tends to stay in there.

Totally possible there's extra heuristics in there though; I totally can't remember from when I ran that thing but it took about a week to run and spent most of its time waiting on other people's servers, so burning a bunch more CPU doing extra analysis wouldn't cause Netcraft any issue at all, I don't think.

Woah, where did all those domains (300m+ over a year) come from?

Isn't it true that IIS makes the most profit out of all the web servers and thus 'wins'? Just like that iPhone vs. Android argument.

Profits related to the iPhone tells you something about its users - money spenders, good market to target. Profits related to IIS, unless you're in the business of selling breain-dead. NET components, only tells you how fucked up you are for choosing a commercial web server, when the alternatives are not only better but also free and also preferred by the top busiest sites ever (except MSDN).

Uh wow.That's not even wrong. Not sure if I should reply to a troll.

Even if what you said is true, how does it change the fact that MS makes the most money out of web servers and not others?

StackOverflow, NewEgg, PlentyOfFish etc. are not busy sites now? It's funny to see how StackOverflow was able to scale easily while Reddit couldn't. There's a lot more to running high traffic sites than just the web server.

Maybe you should enlighten the companies below?

Costco - http://www.costco.com/ [costco.com] Crate & Barrel - http://www.crateandbarrel.com/ [crateandbarrel.com] Home Shopping Network - http://www.hsn.com/ [hsn.com] Buy.com - http://www.buy.com/ [buy.com] Dell - http://www.dell.com/ [dell.com] Nasdaq - http://www.nasdaq.com/ [nasdaq.com] Virgin - http://www.virgin.com/ [virgin.com] 7-Eleven - http://www.7-eleven.com/ [7-eleven.com] Carnival Cruise Lines - http://www.carnival.com/ [carnival.com] L'Oreal - http://www.loreal.com/ [loreal.com] Remax - http://www.remax.com/ [remax.com] Monster Jobs - http://www.monster.com/ [monster.com] USA Today - http://www.usatoday.com/ [usatoday.com] ComputerJobs.com - http://computerjobs.com/ [computerjobs.com] Match.com - http://www.match.com/ [match.com] National Health Services (UK) - http://www.nhs.uk/ [www.nhs.uk] CarrerBuilder.com - http://www.careerbuilder.com/ [careerbuilder.com] Newegg http://newegg.com/ [newegg.com] Geico http://geico.com/ [geico.com] Capital One http://capitalone.com/ [capitalone.com] Zecco http://zecco.com/ [zecco.com]

IIS (MS) plays a different game compared to e.g. Apache. Since the Apache Foundation is non-profit, I doubt they define "winning" by revenue.

Isn't it free as in "comes with an operating system"?

Right, but the server OS can run you $K.

Netcraft confirms it!

(Sorry, the old ways die hard :)

I doubt NGinx is gaining much market share at the expense of IIS.