August 2008 Web Server Survey - Netcraft





In the August 2008 survey we received responses from 176,748,506 sites. This month's overall growth of 1.3 million sites reflects Apache's growth of 1.2 million and Google's gain of half a million sites, but a loss of 760 thousand sites using Microsoft IIS.

Aside from Apache's and Google's leading growth, Igor Sysoev's nginx shows the next largest gain, climbing by 170 thousand sites to a new total of 2.4 million and retaining its position as the 5th largest web server vendor.



It is good to see Apache's dominance reduced from where it was a couple of years back, but it is still good to see that the growth of the leading proprietary (closed source) Web server's market share stalling and even reversing a little bit. It was somewhat disappointing to see lighttpd's share dropping, however, because it is the leading alternative FLOSS server. It would be good to have four or five different non-proprietary Web servers leading the pack, with closed-source proprietary software bringing up the rear.




The best news, of course, is that proprietary software is soon to be pushed to the edges of the market--to become niche products, instead of general-use products--but we cannot see it yet, not even in this market. There is still some growth in some proprietary products, and some proprietary products continue to have distinct advantages over some of their more open competitors. The power of community is erasing that advantage in most places it exists, but there is also corporate inertia to overcome. I would like to see most proprietary products pushed almost completely into special-purpose niches of server-side markets over the next ten or twenty years.




There will always be small, special-purpose areas where there is enough potential revenue to attract specialists who can sustain an advantage over their community-developed competitors for some long period of time. In the general market, however, the power of community-based development is so much that I cannot expect proprietary products to remain competitive much longer. Also, there are some smaller niche areas that are not able to support specialized proprietary developers, but may be able to support community-based development.