Ever wondered about the market share of web servers on internet? If not, think about it. Why? because depending on the growth patterns of servers, you can make smart decisions to learn skills related to the server which can give you most exposure in times to come.
Let's start the analysis of web servers based on Netcraft survey..
Based on the netcraft August 2020 survey, which received responses from 1,230,576,586 sites across 261,821,287 unique domains and 10,349,486 web-facing computers.
The number of nginx based web servers increased by 83,000 in August 2020, which means that - for the first time - nginx is in use by more web servers than any other web server, including Apache. This is another milestone for nginx, and reflects its impressive growth in recent years.
The chart above shows the trend of all the major servers on the web. Clearly studying the chart above which shows the trend of major webservers from 1995 till August 2020, its clearly visible that Nginx is leading the trend. Apache which was once a leader in web server has started seeing a decline. A better pie representation of the share is given below:
Nginx captures a whooping 36% market share which seems to be growing as times to come...
Which Web Servers are included in Others?
Above chart also shows that other web servers have a market share of around 24%, that's a big number. Lets find out some of the open source web servers which are included in others share.
- Caddy: Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go
- Jetty: Eclipse Jetty provides a Web server and javax.servlet container, plus support for HTTP/2, WebSocket, OSGi, JMX, JNDI, JAAS and many other integrations.
- lighttpd: lighttpd is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems.
- XSP: XSP is a simple, standalone web server written in C# that hosts ASP.NET's System for Linux and other Unix operating systems. It runs on the Mono runtime for Linux and the .NET Framework runtime, making it usable as a lightweight web server on any platform supporting .NET.
- Tntnet: Tntnet is Web server software, coded in C++, which enables other C++ programs to bundle requests modules. This enables developing Web applications in C++. The GET and POST requests are interpreted by the tntnet server and sent to the web application program, which will send a reply back over the network. Tntnet is free software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License
- Monkey: Monkey is a lightweight and powerful web server and development stack for Linux & OSX. It has been designed to be very scalable with low memory and CPU consumption, the perfect solution for embedded devices. Made for ARM, x86 and x64.
- G-WAN: G-WAN runs C, C# or Java with less CPU and less RAM while handling more requests than other servers. Other languages (Go, PHP, Python, Ruby, JS...) benefit from G-WAN's multicore architecture. G-WAN better uses CPU Cores to make the Internet of Things fly thousand times higher !
- nxweb – Fast and Lightweight Web Server for Applications Written in C & Python
- Barracuda Web Server: The Barracuda Embedded Web Server is a small embedded web server C library. ... When embedded in remote-monitoring and control-management applications, Barracuda Embedded Web Server manages secure HTTP connections for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication and Human-to-Machine (H2M) interfaces.
- WildFly: WildFly is a powerful, modular, & lightweight application server that helps you build amazing applications. WildFly, formerly known as JBoss AS, or simply JBoss, is an application server authored by JBoss, now developed by Red Hat. WildFly is written in Java and implements the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specification. It runs on multiple platforms.
- Gunicorn: Gunicorn 'Green Unicorn' is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. It's a pre-fork worker model. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.
So what does this Web Servers market share mean for us?
We can conclude one thing for sure i.e. Nginx is showing better growth potential than other web servers. Although Apache has been one of the most widely used web server on the web, Nginx has surpassed it. There is a whooping 36% share which is captured by Nginx which keeps on growing. So, decide for yourself which technology which give you a longer returns on your investment. In-case, you want to learn Nginx, you can click this link to get started. All the best!
