In the October 2024 survey we received responses from 1,131,068,688 sites across 271,754,817 domains and 13,003,235 web-facing computers. This reflects an increase of 12.0 million sites, 971,957 domains, and 62,565 web-facing computers.

OpenResty experienced the largest gain of 2.2 million sites (+1.98%) this month, increasing its market share to 10.1% (+0.09pp). Cloudflare made the next largest gain of 1.5 million sites (+1.18%).

Apache suffered the largest loss of 2.2 million sites (-1.11%) this month. It now accounts for 17.6% (-0.39pp) of sites seen by Netcraft. Microsoft experienced the next largest loss of 699,464 sites (-3.45%).

Future of the .io TLD

Earlier this month, the UK announced that sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, will be transferred to Mauritius. This has caused speculation over the future of the .io TLD, which has gained popularity amongst tech companies in recent years due to I/O also being an acronym for “input/output”. In January 2013, we saw just 4,224 web-facing .io domains, compared to 733,662 domains this month.

Around 17,000 of the top million busiest sites use the .io TLD, such as NFT platform OpenSea, AI audio company ElevenLabs, and open-source home automation project Home Assistant.

As country code TLDs correspond to ISO 3166 country codes, there is a possibility that .io will be retired if the IO country code is removed from the standard. While ccTLDs for some former countries still exist, such as .su for the Soviet Union, others have been deleted, including .yu, .tp, .zr, .an, and .um.

Vendor news

• Apache Tomcat versions 11.0.0, 10.1.31, and 9.0.96 were released, containing WebDAV, HTTP/2, and garbage collection improvements.
• nginx version 1.27.2 was released on October 2nd. It adds support for OCSP stapling and using OCSP during client certificate validation to the stream module.
• OpenResty version 1.27.1.1 was released on October 15th.

For more information see Active Sites.