Highlights of web technology surveys, September 2010: Statistics behind the nginx success story

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 September 2010 in News, Nginx, Web Servers

Nginx is an open source web server originally developed 2004 for the Russian Rambler portal. It has steadily gained market share and is now at 5.3%, only behind Apache and Microsoft-IIS, see our historical trend report. At the moment, it gains around 0.2% per month.

If we look at the technology change report, we see that it gains from all the others, primarily from the big ones, of course.

In our detailed technology report, we can see that nginx is used by many large sites, including qq.com, the Chinese portal which ranks amongst the top 10 websites world-wide, and by several other top 100 sites. We also see that some high profile sites switched to nginx recently, including Soso.com, a popular Chinese search engine, and Stackoverflow.com, a well-known programming Q&A site.

In the ranking breakdown report, we can see that nginx is even much more used by top sites (around 14%) than by average sites, presumably due to the lightweight and high-performance nature of that server.

The top-level-domain breakdown report shows that nginx is, of course, used very much in Russia (42,8%) and neighboring countries, and it is still rarely used in Germany, Japan and Italy.

Although there is a Windows version of nginx (currently in beta), it is deployed almost exclusively on Unix/Linux. Consequently, it is very rarely used in combination with Windows technologies, but relatively often on sites using Ruby.

Finally, let's have a look at the nginx versions. It is remarkable that such a successful piece of software has not yet reached version 1.0. The latest development version 0.8 already used by many sites, but version 0.7 still dominates, and even the old 0.6 is used by more than 25%. New subversions are released quite often, which produces one of the busiest detailed version trend diagram we have seen.

In a market that is dominated by very few players, it is always good to see some competition coming up. Therefore we wish nginx all the best, even if we don't use it on our own site (yet).

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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