According to web server stats vendor Netcraft’s January 2012 survey, there are now nearly 583 million sites on the Internet. The January survey figure represents an increase of 27.2 million sites over the December 2011 figures, for a 4.9 percent gain.
The biggest winner in terms of web servers appears to be the open source nginx server. During the past month, nginx added 6.9 million new hostnames. In total, Netcraft’s January 2012 survey found just over 56 million hostnames running on nginx, giving the open source web server upstart a 9.63 percent share.
Nginx has emerged in recent years as a faster alternative to Apache HTTP for those looking for a viable open source web server. In October 2011, the commercial Nginx company behind the open source project raised $3 million in funding to help fuel its efforts.
“For NGINX getting to the 2nd place in “Active Domains” Netcraft category is an important milestone, however we really see an even more important one in getting to number across “All Domains” (where Microsoft IIS is currently at 14.46 percent and we are at 9.63 percent according to Netcraft),” Andrew Alexeev, Nginx co-founder told InternetNews.com. “We mostly see the recent Netcraft reports as a statistics tool acknowledging the general trend of growing numbers of NGINX-powered web sites.”
Alexeev added that Nginx isn’t just about being an alternative to Apache.
“NGINX has also ignited a trend towards alternative web architectures, where the processing of high concurrency, latency and static content is offloaded to the previously non-existing layer between the network and the busy application backends,” Alexeev said. “The other trend here is to integrate a number of performance-enabling tools like Memcache/NoSQL software directly with this “edge web server” layer typically based on NGINX.”
“So what we really see with the growing numbers of NGINX installations is actually a growing number of better (in terms of performance, scalability, realibility and serviceability) architected web services.”
Read the full story at ServerWatch.com:
Nginx Passes Microsoft for Active Web Server Share
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
