Apache Gains 21 Million Hostnames in May

Apache continues to be the most popular web server on the internet and is still growing the fastest. Apache added 21 million new hostnames in the last month, a big spike compared to the 12.5 million added in April. However, when it comes to active web servers, Apache only added a couple of hundred of thousands and actually lost a bit of market share, overall.

"Apache was the only major web server software to gain hostnames this month, with growth of 21M and nearly 2.2 percentage points of market share," Netcraft reported.

"The largest growth was seen at OVH, which gained more than 8.6M Apache hostnames. Large growth was also seen at Softlayer (5.6M), AmeriNOC (2.5M) and Hanaro Telecom (1.3M)," it explained.

Microsoft's IIS, the only real competitor to Apache, though with a significantly smaller market share, had a poorer month, it actually lost about 1.4 million hostnames in May. This after adding 800,000 in the previous month.

"Among the other server vendors, Microsoft saw the largest loss with 1.4M fewer hostnames than in May. The majority of this loss was caused by VPLS losing nearly 1.5M hostnames," the report explained.

nginx, a smaller but popular web server had a poor month as well, it lost 1.2 million hostnames, which at its size is quite significant, nginx's market share is less than half of Microsoft's IIS which is slightly over a quarter of Apache's.

"Google experienced the smallest loss this month with 262k fewer hostnames than last month," the report added. Google is the fourth largest web server.

When it comes to active web servers, the picture changes somewhat. Google is larger than nginx when it comes to active servers across all domains. The first three major web servers, in terms of active use, Apache, Microsoft and Google all lost market share, while nginx was the only one to add.