W3Tech: the share of nginx in the world rose to third, Apache fell below half

Most popular web servers in different countries. Source: W3Tech.com

It would seem that quite recently in 2012, we celebrated that the nginx web server overtook Microsoft IIS and came in second place on the Internet among active sites (nginx had 12.18%, Microsoft - 12.14%). Over the past five years, nginx has greatly strengthened the position. According to Netcraft statistics for March 2017 in the same category, its share is 19.67%, and Microsoft IIS dropped to 8.95%. The leader is the same - Apache with 45.82%.

Nginx was the only web server whose share grew in all Netcraft metrics in March 2017. It was the only web server whose share grew steadily.


Netcraft statistics on the share of web servers on active sites, March 2017
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In addition to Netcraft, there are other statistics on web servers. For example, W3Tech.com yesterday issued very beautiful "round" numbers . According to their estimates, nginx is now installed on every third web server in the world.

Seven years ago, the share of nginx was only 3.9%, and now it is 33.3%.


Over the same period of 2010-2017, the share of Apache fell from 71.5% to slightly below 50%, while the share of Microsoft IIS fell from 20.6% to 11.3%.

According to the conversion statistics , most often they switch to nginx from Apache. The reverse process is also observed.


The world leader in the implementation of nginx is Russia with an indicator of 76.8%. This is understandable, since the author of nginx is a Russian self-taught programmer and former system administrator Igor Sysoev. He wrote the program in 2004. In addition to Russia, nginx has absolute leadership in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, in selected countries in Asia, Africa and South America.

In almost the rest of the world, Apache is the leader, with the exception of China, Turkey, Egypt and several Arab countries, where Microsoft IIS holds the first place.

Why is the share of nginx growing and Apache falling? Perhaps this is due to simpler installation and configuration, support for more modern protocols. Among the new sites, the share of nginx is 36.4%, and Apache - 47.7%.

76.8% of sites with HTTP / 2 support work on nginx, and only 2.3% on Apache (the HTTP / 2 module for Apache still has the status of "experimental"). A similar situation among sites with IPv6 support: 63.6% of them work on nginx, three times less on Apache. Nginx is the # 1 choice among sites written in Ruby, Python and Scala, as well as those using modern JavaScript libraries like AngularJS, Vue, js and React. It seems that all the most modern works on nginx.

There is no clear trend among operating systems, but the servers on Red Hat / CentOS overwhelmingly use Apache, and systems on Gentoo prefer nginx.