Microsoft gets a beating, along with Apache and Google in the web server department by no other than upstart Nginx. Thanks to the financial muscle of venture capitalists like Michael Dell backing it up, open source web server OS Nginx pushed out Microsoft’s Internet Information Server to become the second most popular Web server OS among active websites in the market. According to the 2012 Web Server Survey conducted by Netcraft, the last month saw Nginx win market shares among website operators while its competitors Microsoft, Apache and Google each suffered market share declines.
Nginx débuted in 2004 to handle high volume internet traffic to and from several websites and was used by about 25% of the busiest 1,000 websites in the world that included Facebook, Groupon, Zappos, Dropbox, Hulu and WordPress. The new Web server OS was created by Igor Syosev, together with Andrew Alexeev, who co-founded the Nginx company just last July. Three months later, the company as favored with a $3 million fund infusion from MSD capital, Dell CEO’s personal venture capital firm, along with Runa Capital and BV Capital.
Netcraft reported in its survey that there are now around 582 million websites registered with over 180 million as active. Of these active website, some 12.18 % run on the Nginx server platform, or around 22.2 million. These are sites that house unique content and not generated using templates, according to Netcraft. By comparison, Nginx was run on 11.6% or around 20 million of active websites early December. That means that the upstart open source OS had a 0.57% jump in just a month.
In contrast, Microsoft IIS is now run on just 12.14% of active websites, or a total of some 22.1 million, representing a 0.17% decline from its December market share level of 12.31%, or a total of 21.6 million.
According to Netcraft, Apache still holds a commanding lead of 57.93% of active websites or a total of 105.7 million sites. But it also suffered a decline from 58.2% in December. In the meantime, Google on the 4th spot also went down from 8.13% to 7.9% market share.
