Web Server Market Share 2017: Nginx Surges, Apache Leads, IIS Gains Ground

Netcraft released its latest web‑server market‑share report, showing a 1.1% increase in the total number of active websites compared with the same period last year.

Nginx Share Continues to Rise

Nginx grew from a 21.4% share in the previous month to 3.84% of all web servers, moving into third place overall and narrowing the gap with Microsoft’s IIS to just 122,000 servers. It is projected that Nginx could overtake IIS to become the second‑largest web server this year.

Apache remains the dominant web server with a 42.78% market share, running on approximately 2.8 million servers across various versions and the derived httpd variant.

Apache 2.2.x Will Stop Receiving Updates

After many years of releases, the final Apache 2.2.x versions (including 2.2.34 and 2.4.27) were launched on the 11th of this month, marking the end of the 2.2 branch. No further patches will be issued after the end of the year.

Overall Web‑Server Share

In terms of total web‑site deployments, Microsoft IIS surpassed the 50% threshold for the first time, while Apache’s share fell by roughly one‑third. Four years ago, Apache held more than half of all web sites and IIS accounted for only about 20%.

All Active Sites Metric

Netcraft’s new “active sites” metric counts sites with high traffic and frequent updates. Among these active sites, Apache still commands the largest share at 45.2%, with IIS at 7.48%, leaving Apache ahead by 45.2 percentage points.

In recent years, IIS is unlikely to challenge Apache’s leadership among active sites.