Why Cloudflare Overtook Apache and Nginx: The Rise of Pingora Proxy

According to Netcraft’s survey of over a million sites, Cloudflare jumped from the third to the first position in January 2023, overtaking Apache and Nginx to become the most popular web server with a 21.64 % market share, followed by Apache at 21.40 % and Nginx at 21.20 %.

Cloudflare, founded in 2009, is a U.S. security and hosting provider. It gained early attention when the hacker group LulzSec used its services in 2011, and after a successful IPO in 2019 its stock rose 20 % on the first day.

The company’s core infrastructure originally relied on Nginx, but in September 2022 Cloudflare announced that it would replace Nginx with a new internal HTTP proxy called Pingora, written in Rust and designed for Cloudflare’s scale.

CTO John Graham‑Cumming explained that while Nginx had served Cloudflare well, its worker‑process architecture could no longer meet the company’s growing business needs, leading to performance limitations.

Pingora processes more than one trillion requests per day, delivers new features to Cloudflare customers, and consumes only about one‑third of the CPU and memory resources of the previous proxy infrastructure.