In the August 2013 survey we received responses from 716,822,317 sites, an increase of 18 million. Based on the trends over the last six months, Netcraft expects to see 1 billion responsive sites within the next 18 months.
Apache lost a significant amount of market share this month, tumbling by 5.23 percentage points. Its market share now stands at 46.96%, the lowest since March 2009. This large change was caused by the loss of 28 million Apache sites, a large gain of 26 million sites powered by Microsoft IIS, plus other reasonably significant gains by nginx and Google. Google's growth was primarily due to 3.1 million new sites using Google's App Engine (appspot.com) infrastructure and 2.7 million new Blogger sites (blogspot.com).
The bulk of the changes in Apache and Microsoft web server market share this month can be attributed to a single hosting company: Go Daddy was previously hosting 25 million sites using Apache Traffic Server on Linux, but these are now served by Microsoft IIS 7.5. The machines still exhibit the TCP/IP characteristics of Linux, and are likely reverse proxies, each of which is serving an average of about 150 thousand sites. Apache Traffic Server first appeared at Go Daddy during Netcraft's May survey. At the time, 75% of all sites hosted by Go Daddy were using ATS, which made Go Daddy responsible for hosting 99% of all ATS sites in the world.
Remarkably, this is the first time since December 2009 that Apache has not been used by more than half of the world's websites. During that period, Apache's market share peaked at 66% in July 2011, although its greatest ever market share was observed in November 2005, when it hit 71%.
Despite speculation that the recent PRISM revelations would result in a mass exodus from American data centers and web hosting companies, Netcraft has not yet seen any evidence of this. Within the most popular 10 thousand sites, Netcraft witnessed only 40 sites moving away from US-based hosting companies. Contrary to some people's expectations, 47 sites moved to the US, which actually resulted in a net migration to the US.
This trend is also reflected by the entire web server survey, where a net sum of 270 thousand sites moved to the US from other countries (in total, 3.9 million sites moved to the US, while 3.6 million moved from the US). Germany was the most popular departure country, with nearly 1.2 million sites moving from German hosting companies. This was followed by Canada, where 803 thousand sites hopped across the border to the US.
Developer
July 2013
Percent
August 2013
Percent
Change
Apache
364,696,792
52.19%
336,622,050
46.96%
-5.23
Microsoft
137,351,211
19.65%
163,098,703
22.75%
3.10
nginx
95,017,255
13.60%
104,311,568
14.55%
0.96
Google
27,406,059
3.92%
30,550,914
4.26%
0.34
Developer
July 2013
Percent
August 2013
Percent
Change
Apache
103,062,175
54.54%
100,900,152
53.62%
-0.92
Microsoft
20,682,219
10.94%
22,167,582
11.78%
0.84
Google
18,483,652
9.78%
20,833,163
11.07%
1.29
nginx
23,392,815
12.38%
20,786,590
11.05%
-1.33
For more information see Active Sites
Developer
July 2013
Percent
August 2013
Percent
Change
Apache
580,529
58.05%
569,270
56.93%
-1.13
nginx
136,815
13.68%
148,930
14.89%
1.21
Microsoft
124,067
12.41%
132,902
13.29%
0.88
Google
22,830
2.28%
25,818
2.58%
0.30