March 2022 Web Server Survey

In the March 2022 survey we received responses from 1,169,621,187 sites across 272,177,331 unique domains and 11,877,217 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4.00 million sites, but a gain of 977,000 domains and 103,000 web facing computers.

Cloudflare gained the largest number of sites, with 1.32 million more than in the February survey. Its growth was also consistent across other metrics, having gained +176,000 domains (+0.77%) and +256,000 active sites (+1.24%), with an extra 0.12pp share of the top one million sites.

nginx, the current leader by most metrics, had a particularly strong growth in terms of domains, having gained 978,000 domains (+1.35%) this month—the largest gain of any vendor in this metric. Though it lost 2.98 million sites, it appears to be serving more interesting content overall, as measured by a 158,000 increase in its number active sites. It also gained the most additional web-facing computers out of all vendors this month, with 39,300 more than the previous month. OpenResty, which uses nginx, is serving 62,300 more active sites and now counts towards an additional 441 of the top one million sites. OpenResty was also counted on 6,640 more computers (+5.04%) than last month.

Apache has the greatest number of active sites and, by a narrow 1.03pp margin over nginx, the greatest share of the top one million sites. However, it shrunk in both of these metrics, losing 583,000 active sites and 2,130 of the top one million. Apache lost out in most other metrics too, with 756,000 fewer domains and just over 5 million fewer sites. It did, however, gain a few more computers over last month, but nginx’s large growth meant that Apache still lost market share in this measurement.

Microsoft saw declines in all metrics this month, losing 3.22 million sites (-7.13%), 156,000 domains (-1.75%), 118,000 active sites (-1.88%), and 7,620 computers (-0.57%). Microsoft also lost 1,000 sites from its share of the top million.

Although one of the smaller web servers on the market, LiteSpeed has frequently shown strong and consistent growth, with this month being no exception. It had the largest sites and active sites growth of all web servers in the March 2022 survey, gaining 1.92 million sites and 277,000 active sites.

Vendor news

• Apache released version 2.4.53 of their httpd web server. This version contains security fixes for four different CVEs. The release also brings a number of general bug fixes. Apache also released bug patches for several versions of Tomcat.

• OpenSSL released versions 3.0.2 and 1.1.1n of their cryptography library in order to patch against a high severity denial of service vulnerability. OpenSSL is used by both Apache and nginx, which together account for a majority of all sites, domains, and web-facing computers.

• Microsoft Azure has expanded to a new region in the North of China. Microsoft’s share of the web server software market is much larger in China compared to the rest of the world, with 16.5% of active sites, 20.1% of domains, 13.4% of sites, and 15.0% of web-facing computers.

For more information see Active Sites