Nginx Sees the Biggest Growth in Web Server Market in August

August didn't see a huge increase in the number of hostnames on the web, certainly nothing like July, but the number of web servers around is still growing. 22 million were added in the last month for a total of 485,173,671 sites.

Apache got the most new web servers, but its overall market share saw a small drop. It still makes up some two thirds of the market.

"Nginx had the biggest increase in market share, with a growth of 0.36 percentage points. This is the largest increase that we have seen for nginx since January," Netcraft explained.

"Nginx also continues to increase its share of active sites, gaining ground on Microsoft and remaining as the 2nd most popular open source webserver," it said.

"Google on the other hand saw a moderate loss in active sites this month, down by nearly 3.8M," it added.

Over 315 million hostnames used Apache at the end of August. That's 14 million more than in the previous month. It wasn't enough for it to maintain its share of the market, it dropped some 0.13 percent points, to slightly above 65 percent.

That said, Apache is still four times as popular as its closest rival, Microsoft, which added three million hostnames in the last month. It too lost some market share though.

The only web server to gain market share in August is Nginx, which added 0.36 percent points to its share. It is now used by a little over eight percent of the hostnames detected by Netcraft.

In terms of active sites, the market is a bit more stable, with few changes from the previous month. Apache gained about two million hostnames, getting very close to a total of 100 million. Nginx added about 450,000 in the last month.