Nginx just became the most used web server among the top 1000 websites

I just want to say how incredibly lucky I feel to have two very mature and high performing OSS web servers.<p>Both nginx and Apache are absolutely solid pieces of software. I wish we had as many alternatives to Microsoft Excel as we do IIS.

I wonder how much of this is actually a reverse proxy to apache, though.

And yet, according to Netcraft yesterday:<p><pre><code> &quot;Apache and nginx, both open source web servers, have lost market share this month whilst Microsoft gained significantly, up by 2.43 percentage points, to just shy of 20% of worldwide sites. For the second consecutive month, nginx is powering fewer sites than in the previous month&#x27;s Web Server Survey, which is due, in part, to almost 2M sites moving from nginx and to Apache. Within the million busiest sites, a similar picture emerges: nginx lost over 4,000 busy sites, many of which have moved to Apache.&quot; </code></pre> <a href="http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-server-survey.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.netcraft.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;02&#x2F;july-2013-web-s...</a>

There are two trends here.<p>Many people recognize that it&#x27;s much cheaper to place nginx in front of other web servers than to buy more servers. We could say that nginx is mainstream now, so any serious website would use it. If you take &quot;top million websites&quot; instead of &quot;top 1000&quot;, you might see different percentages. Automated tests just see nginx in the header, although something else is the actual workhorse for the site.<p>Some of the stuff does not need Apache anymore. As I moved almost all my projects from PHP to Node.js, there&#x27;s little use for Apache now. And nginx serves static content with less CPU and RAM.

Student here.<p>Why is Nginx more popular than G-WAN?<p>I saw the benchmarks for G-WAN earlier this week (<a href="http://gwan.com/benchmark" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwan.com&#x2F;benchmark</a>) and am curious why most people would choose nginx over the performance that G-WAN provides?

It&#x27;s likely that our website would be counted as nginx since the response headers include &quot;Server: nginx...&quot;. And there is an nginx load-balancing layer at the front.<p>But it&#x27;s a pretty thin layer with the real &quot;web servers&quot; behind it.

It would be interesting to see what they consider the top 1000 websites to be. Does anyone know if their list is public?<p>EDIT: Found it. This post <a href="http://w3techs.com/blog/entry/w3techs_surveys_are_now_based_on_the_top_10_million_sites" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;w3techs.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;entry&#x2F;w3techs_surveys_are_now_based_...</a> implies they are using Alexa&#x27;s rankings.

Also note the inverted shape of the trends: Apache is much more popular among less visited sites, but gets less so as you go up. nginx is unpopular with the masses, but more so with the most popular sites.<p>I can see at least two ways to interpret this:<p>1. nginx is just strictly better, and the sites at the top need that performance&#x2F;capability and employ the top&#x2F;best-informed architects to maintain their systems, so they&#x27;re the early adopters. Everyone else is still on Apache by virtue of inertia, but will slowly move over as time goes on.<p>2. nginx is faster for high concurrency, and mostly gets used as a front-lines layer in front of something else, maybe even Apache itself. In this case, the charts will stay about like they are now, because only the most stressed sites need that much engineering.<p>I don&#x27;t know that there&#x27;s an easy way to differentiate between the two without either waiting and watching for change or knowing more about the internals of the top few thousand sites.

I am a person that doesn&#x27;t really understands webserver software. What is approximately the difference between Apache and Nginx?<p>Also, should I stop using LAMP stack for my small and experimental PHP websites that very few people visit, or is it good enough?

A better title would be: &quot;Nginx is the most used web server in front of other servers&quot;

Interesting - how can the trend seen in those charts be explained? The clearly falling popularity of Apache the larger the website and clearly rising popularity of Nginx complement each other nicely.

At work, we have Ngnix as reverse proxy for some static files. Oh boy is this thing fast with very very small amount of resources (cpu, ram) and big number of requests.

I love nginx! I&#x27;ve almost finished a blog series of running Mono on nginx on Ubuntu&#x2F;Azure.<p>Awesome stuff!

And so it should! Apache is last millennium&#x27;s technology.

The open source continues to kill the industry burying the progress under loads of free shit like that.

This is just a PR and propaganda. We all know that JVM is the best &quot;platform&quot; ever developed by humanity and Jetty is the most efficient, fast and especially reliable under a high load web server.)<p>IIS must be on the second place, btw, considering how much man-hours and millions of USD were spent on it. We all know that MS technology is superior and very scientific.)