In the June 2023 survey we received responses from 1,106,671,903 sites across 255,487,423 domains and 12,106,503 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 2.7 million sites, 16.0 million domains, and an increase of 69,309 web-facing computers.

Microsoft saw the largest gain of 8.7 million sites this month, with smaller gains of 211,862 domains (+3.03%) and 1,003 computers (+0.08%). Microsoft now accounts for 3.12% of sites (+0.79pp) and 2.82% of domains (+0.24pp) seen by Netcraft.

Cloudflare and OpenResty also saw significant growth this month, with Cloudflare gaining 4.8 million sites (+4.22%) and 35,435 domains (+0.14%), and OpenResty gaining 5.2 million sites (+6.01%) and 1.3 million domains (+3.30%).

nginx saw the largest loss of 19.5 million sites (-6.79%) and 16.1 million domains (-22.07%) this month. The loss was primarily driven by the loss of 27.2 million sites running nginx on top-level domains managed by Freenom (.cf, .ga, .gq, .ml and .tk). Freenom halted domain registrations earlier this year, after Meta filed a lawsuit against Freenom and accused it of not taking appropriate steps to respond to abuse reports. nginx now accounts for 24.2% of sites (-1.70pp) and 22.3% of domains (-4.63pp) seen by Netcraft.

Despite a loss of 474,070 domains (-0.80%), Apache now accounts for 23.04% of domains (+1.19pp) seen by Netcraft, overtaking nginx to reach first place in this metric for the first time since March 2020.

Within the top million busiest sites, Cloudflare, nginx, and Apache all saw small losses in market share. Cloudflare’s market share now stands at 22.05% (-0.02pp), nginx at 21.08% (-0.10pp), and Apache at 20.96% (-0.20pp). Amazon and Varnish saw the largest growth in the top million sites, gaining 3,859 and 2,101 sites respectively, bringing their market shares to 1.68% (+0.39pp) and 0.44% (+0.21pp).

.ga TLD returned to Gabonese management

.ga, the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Gabon, has been returned to Gabonese management under ANINF, the National Agency for Digital Infrastructure and Frequencies of the Gabonese Republic. ANINF made the decision due to the “failure of the company Freenom”, the previous registry.

The technical migration was conducted between 4th June and 7th June, with assistance from Afnic, the French Network Information Centre. According to ANINF’s estimation, there are currently over 7 million domain names registered under .ga. However, Freenom has not provided data on “several million” of these domain names. Afnic stated that these would be deleted as part of the migration.

In this month’s survey we saw 1.03 million web-facing domain names within the .ga TLD, an 80.6% decrease compared to 5.30 million domain names in May.

Vendor news

• LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS) 6.1.2 was released on 24th May 2023, containing minor improvements and bug fixes.
• lighttpd 1.4.71 was released on 27th May 2023. It separates HTTP/2 support into an optional mod_h2 module.
• Apache Tomcat versions 8.5.90, 9.0.76, 10.1.10, and 11.0.0-M7 were released in June. These releases add support for virtual threads, update HTTP/2 to use the RFC-9218 prioritization scheme, deprecate the xssProtectionEnabled from HttpHeaderSecurityFilter, and update Tomcat Native.
• nginx 1.25.1 was released on 13th June 2023. It includes changes to HTTP/2, removal of the deprecated “ssl” directive, and HTTP/3 bug fixes.

For more information see Active Sites.