Most Popular Web Servers 1993 - 2024

In this video I look at the tech that powers the internet, web server apps. Here are the most popular web servers since almost the beginning of the internet. It only considers active domains, so no squatted or coming soon domains; those tend to share one install per thousands of squatted domains. This data comes from Netcraft which has been tracking this data since the start of the internet.

[joaopedroalbernaz]

A lot of the reported "Cloudflare" are actually just Apache or Nginx behind Cloudflare proxies

[DJPJ.]

There's no way "Others" has over 21% and still does not include anyone with as much as 2%.

[dariuszmion]

This list makes no sense! Cloudflare, Google are not HTTP servers.

[rursus]

I'm surprised that IIS lived that long. It shouldn't.

[manuel-rubio]

There are technologies that makes no sense to be in the list, i.e. NodeJS because most of the installations I saw that's behind an Nginx, and not sure what do you mean with Google Cloud or Cloudflare, keeping in mind that Cloudflare is a CDN, of course, it's going to be the frontend for lots of websites using Apache, Nginx or another webserver. Finally, "others" NEVER should be in the top of the list, are you sure that finishing in 21.1% there are 10 or more web server with less than 2%?

[ifcwlme]

There is a web server call "Others"? 😅

[slobodanmitic]

1. Easy to use
2. Compatibility
3. Cool kids

[PabloPaiva]

You have a lot of libraries in python to launch webservers, basic ones and others with really nice scalability like gunicorn+flask. This could explain a part of the "others" first place.

[SAS]

others must be separate, it’s ridiculous that winning by now column is mix of unknown entities

[gwgux]

Considering the overwhelming number of web servers out there, this would be one of the hardest ones to display. Though I would recommend adding in more info screens. You did a good job of explaining what Apache was, but never put anything up about NodeJS, nginx, etc. Plus, if you're going to list services like Cloudflare and Google, you should definitely have info screens on there to explain why they would show up. When "Others" overtook Apache, that also should have had an info screen stating that more websites use "niche" web servers combined than the websites that use the most popular web server software.

[yewenyi]

I am using nginx because it is preferred by nixos and using Apache is a bit of a pain.

[yaynative]

IIS might be more popular than that if you consider organizations that only use it internally.

A lot of solutions want you to use IIS to host their portal for your organization.

[bryanguegan]

3:03 Smartphones weren't there yet!

[Paul-vion]

You *need* to fix the scale. A moving scale just makes it soo much harder to see whether the absolute values go up or down eg. the 2nd bar can be moving left because relative to the top bar it's decreasing, but its absolute percentage share is still growing. You could only see this by looking at the numbers, which defeats the purpose of a moving graph.

Also this video is at least 5min too long. Speed it up (maybe only in the uninteresting sections). And there's no reason this should be a video at all, it could easily be a time-series graph. A link with your sources is also missing.

[udirt]

The Sun/Oracle thing is Netacape Server later iPlanet. It was even bundled with Novell Intranetware (4) and 5. Pretty much ubiquitous then for enterprise stuff like IIS in its heyday.

[bhavinpatel]

What are the servers included in others? Can you provide list …

[mariokusuma]

This is misleading. Why did you compare google cloud with nginx?

[waheebyaqub]

Nice visualisation, love the smooth transitions, what is the background music used in the video.

[ramyres]

Realy... For webservers, only three options are in the marketshare Apache, Nginx e IIS, the others are suitable upper than! Apache and Nginx for Linux are unanimes, but for Azure apps IIS its the number one!

[wviana]

This should have data source fixed in description.