10 Million More Websites Used Apache in January

The web ecosystem continued to grow in January, with almost 10 million new hostnames added. There are now a total of 284,842,077 live sites online, up from 273,301,445, a smaller increase than in the previous month but still a sizeable gain. Most of the new hostnames were running Apache, which had a great month, continuing its growth of the past year.

"Apache saw the largest increase in terms of both market share and absolute growth this month, with 9.6M new hostnames equating to a 1 percentage point increase in market share," monitoring firm Netcraft reported.

"This continues the general upward trend seen for Apache since January last year. The most significant increase occurred in the United States, where 7M new Apache hostnames were recorded," it added.

"Once again, significant contributions to Apache's increase were seen at AmeriNOC (4.6M) and Softlayer Inc (1.3M). Apache also made a net gain of 817k hostnames in the Netherlands as the result of a 1.3M increase at Axoft Group," it explained.

Apache wasn't the only webserver to gain new users in the past month, nginx and lighttpd also saw an upward tick. In terms of market share though, only nginx saw an increase.

Microsoft and Google, on the other hand, both lost market share as well as in terms of absolute numbers. Microsoft lost about 239,000 hostnames while Google's losses were greater, 658,048 hostnames.

In terms of active servers, which are significantly fewer than the total number of hostnames, Apache also leads, though it actually lost a bit of market share.

There were almost one million new hostnames running Apache at the start of February, this while the other big players lost some hostnames. Microsoft lost more than 700,000 active users, Google almost 200,000. nginx added about 300,000 hostnames, and lighttpd about 70,000.