September 2023 Web Server Survey

In the September 2023 survey we received responses from 1,085,035,470 sites across 254,776,456 domains and 12,274,854 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 8.7 million sites and 682,961 domains, but a gain of 112,383 web-facing computers.

OpenResty saw a large loss this month, dropping by 13.3 million sites (-13.99%) and 1.9 million domains (-4.78%). It now accounts for 7.55% of sites and 15.04% of domains seen by Netcraft, down from October by 1.16pp and 0.71pp respectively. This change is also reflected in its usage in the top 1 million sites, where it lost 528 sites (-5.19%).

Google gained 1.9 million sites (+3.34%) and 725,253 domains (+26.43%). This increase gives it a 5.28% share of sites – up from 5.07% (+0.21pp) – and a 1.36% share of domains, which is up from 1.07% (+0.29pp).

nginx further increased its lead in share of computers and active sites, with a gain of 76,227 computers taking it to 39.42% (+0.26pp), and a gain of 30,879 active sites giving it a 18.63% share (+0.11pp). This is despite it losing 5.0 million sites (-1.93%) and 455,426 domains (-0.80%). Combined, this suggests that sites using nginx to host duplicate sites, parked domains, and other machine-generated content have reduced in number, with more sites using it to host unique content.

The inverse is true for Apache, with it gaining 2.1 million sites (+0.93%) and 396,091 domains (+0.68%), but losing 231,789 active sites (-0.57%) and 11,749 computers (-0.37%). Additionally, Apache lost 1,881 sites in the top 1 million, reducing its share to 20.49% (-0.19pp).

Vendor news

• Apache Tomcat version 10.1.13 was released on August 23rd.
• njs, the scripting language used to extend nginx, released version 0.8.1 on September 12th.
• AWS announced general availability of Apple M2 Pro Mac Mini EC2 instances.
• AWS received approval for building 5 new data centers in New Albany, Ohio as part of its first stage of an estimated $7.8 billion investment into expanding its presence in Ohio.
• Akamai announced new compute regions to open during September and October in Amsterdam, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Miami, Florida, Milan, Osaka and São Paulo.
• Google opened a new cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg.
• Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Fonts, allowing Google Fonts to be served by Cloudflare’s network on the customer’s own domain, while automatically rewriting mentions in code. It will be available to customers in October.
  • In the September 2023 survey, 25.7 million out of 204.8 million sites scanned (12.5%) were using Google Fonts.
• Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Trace, a tool for analyzing the full journey of each HTTP request through the numerous products Cloudflare offers.

For more information see Active Sites.