Did Nginx Finally Overtake Apache? March 2020 Web Server Market Snapshot

Netcraft releases its monthly Web Server Survey, the primary reference for global website counts and server market share; the March 2020 report is now available.

The report covers 1,263,025,546 sites, including 257,194,796 distinct domains and 9,659,223 web‑facing computers.

Microsoft and Nginx both saw domain growth in March. Nginx added 4.84 million domains (a 7.2 % rise), raising its market share by 1.6 percentage points to 28.1 %, while Microsoft gained 215 k domains.

For the first time, Nginx’s domain market share exceeded Apache’s by 136 k domains, though Apache still leads in active sites; despite losing 225 k active sites, Apache’s share remains 8.21 percentage points higher than Nginx’s. Apache also leads in web‑facing computers, holding 3.17 % compared to Nginx.

Other observations: Google lost 115 k domains but gained 510 k active sites; Oracle lost 27.8 k domains and 22.2 k active sites. Both have sub‑1 % domain share (Google 0.87 % − 0.06 pp, Oracle 0.22 % − 0.01 pp).

Since December, Cloudflare has been gaining nearly 2 million domains per month, but growth slowed in March, adding only 714,929 domains.

Details: https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2020/03/20/march-2020-web-server-survey.html

Web server overall market situation:

All sites situation:

Domain situation:

Active sites situation: