Microsoft Gaining Ground on Apache on the Web Server Market

Statistics provided by Netcraft reveal that Apache started the new year as the leading Web Server technology, in both the number of sites running on its platform but also when it comes to the number of actual Web server machines.

At the end of January 2016, Netcraft detected 906,616,188 websites and 5,753,264 Web-facing computers, 6,000,000 more sites than in December 2015, and 174,000 new computers.

While the number of websites was expected to grow, regardless of the underlying technology, Netcraft experts were surprised by the huge number of new Web-facing computers added in the past month, which represented a 7.6% jolt from the previous 30 days.

As they investigated, most of these weren't actual Web hosting machines, but Western Digital My Cloud personal storage devices, which in their default configuration come with an auto-running Apache server that lets users connect to their hard drive.

Microsoft is only 5% behind Apache

Overall, by taking a closer look at the actual numbers in the Netcraft report, we can come to a series of conclusions: →     Microsoft is now only 5% behind Apache on the number of websites running on its technology →     Two months ago, Microsoft was 10% back →     Nginx is still going strong at 15% total market share in the number of total websites, even if numbers plummeted from a month ago →     In the top one million sites, Nginx has a 24% market share, ranking second behind Apache's 46% while Microsoft's server tech only runs 11% of the world's most popular websites →     Nearly half (47%) of Web-facing computers are running Apache →     Microsoft server products only run on 27% of these same devices