In the August 2022 survey we received responses from 1,135,075,578 sites across 271,740,771 unique domains and 12,365,527 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4.4 million sites, but a gain of 12,212 domains and 24,355 computers.

OpenResty saw the most significant change in web-facing computers, with a gain of 10,138 (6.1%). Furthermore, 2.8 million (3.1%) extra sites were seen since July, with a small loss of 466,322 domains (1.2%). This continues the trend of OpenResty’s fast growth in web-facing computers (46% since August 2021) while the number of domains and sites has not grown in tandem, remaining roughly static over the period.

nginx continues to be the most commonly used web server and saw modest gains of 25,053 domains (0.03%) and 13,481 computers (0.3%). However, we experienced a significant reduction in the number of nginx-hosted sites responding to our requests this month, with a loss of over 15 million. This represents around 4% of sites hosted using nginx in July.

Continuing the trend of strong growth over the past two months, Cloudflare gained an additional 4.4 million sites (6%) and 1.1 million domains (4.7%). This gives Cloudflare a total market share of 6.8% of sites and 9% of domains, an increase of 0.4pp on both metrics since July. Cloudflare also had the strongest growth amongst the top million busiest sites, gaining 0.25pp, thereby holding a 20.51% market share.

Apache’s position as the most commonly used web server for the top million busiest sites continues to erode, with a loss of 0.19pp this month. nginx continues to gain market share, up 0.07pp. If this trend continues, nginx will overtake Apache in the short term, and in the long term, Cloudflare will overtake both of its rivals.

Vendor news

• nginx reaffirmed its commitment to the open source community in this year’s roadmap, with a greater focus on modernising its community management approach and optimising end developer experiences.
• Lighttpd 1.4.66 was released on 7 August 2022, featuring a range of bug fixes.
• Apache Tomcat 8.5.82 was released on 13 August 2022. The majority of changes were minor, however, the release includes a mitigation for an XSS vulnerability in example code distributed with Tomcat (CVE-2022-34305).
• Cloudflare announced the availability of Weighted Pools for its Load Balancer product, which allows for assigning weights to origin servers to distribute requests non-uniformly.
• LiteSpeed Web Server 6.1 RC1 Dev was released on 17 August 2022. This is the latest version in the LSWS 6.1 stream and includes support for triggering reCAPTCHA in its mod_security engine, and several bugfixes.

For more information see Active Sites