March 2022 Web Server Survey

In which March 2022 Poll from which we received responses 1.169.621.187 sites about 272.177.331 unique domains and 11.877.217 computers connected to the Internet. This reflects a loss of 4.00 million websites but a gain of 977,000 domains and 103,000 internet-connected computers.

Cloudflare has added the largest number of websites, with 1.32 million more than the February survey. Growth was consistent across other metrics as well, with +176,000 domains (+0.77%) and +256,000 active websites (+1.24%), with an additional 0.12pp share of the top 1 million sites.

nginx, the current leader by most metrics, saw particularly strong growth in terms of domains, having added 978,000 domains (+1.35%) this month – the largest gain of any provider in this metric. Despite losing 2.98 million websites, it appears to be providing more interesting content overall, as measured by a 158,000 increase in the number of active websites. It also added the most additional Internet-enabled computers of any vendor this month, up 39,300 from the previous month. OpenResty, which uses nginx, serves 62,300 more active sites and now ranks in an additional 441 of the top 1 million sites. OpenResty was also counted on 6,640 more computers (+5.04%) than the previous month.

Apache has the largest number of active sites and the largest share of the top 1 million sites, by a slim 1.03pp over nginx. However, it shrank in both metrics, losing 583,000 active sites and 2,130 of the top 1 million. Apache also lost on most other metrics, with 756,000 fewer domains and just over 5 million fewer websites. It may have gained a few more machines over the past month, but nginx’s big growth meant Apache was still losing market share by this measure.

Microsoft saw declines across all metrics this month, losing 3.22 million websites (-7.13%), 156,000 domains (-1.75%), 118,000 active websites (-1.88%) and 7,620 computers (-0 .57%). Microsoft also lost 1,000 websites from its share of the top million.

Despite being one of the smaller web servers out there, LiteSpeed ​​has often shown strong and consistent growth, and this month is no exception. In the March 2022 survey, it had the largest growth in websites and active websites of any web server, adding 1.92 million websites and 277,000 active websites.

Supplier News

• Apache has released version 2.4.53 of their httpd web server. This release includes Security fixes for four different CVEs. The release also brings a number of general bug fixes. Apache has also released bug patches for several versions of Male cat.

• OpenSSL released versions 3.0.2 and 1.1.1n of their cryptographic library to patch against a High severity denial of service vulnerability. OpenSSL is used by both Apache and nginx, which together make up a majority of all websites, domains, and computers connected to the Internet.

• Microsoft Azure has expanded to a new region in northern China. Microsoft’s share of the web server software market is much larger in China than in the rest of the world, with 16.5% of active websites, 20.1% of domains, 13.4% of websites and 15.0% of those connected to the Internet connected computers.

For more information, see Active sites