Apache's share goes back above 50%

For more than a decade -- from October 1995 to November 2005, Apache's growth in Web server market share went mostly up. That November the free and open Web server peaked at 70.98% among Top Developers on the Netcraft.com survey for that month.

Since then the share has gone mostly down. In October 2007, Apache's share declined by 2.8% from the previous month, dropping to 47.73%, while while Microsoft IIS gained 2.08% to hold 37.13%. That was Apache's lowest share advantage since IIS appeared in 1996.

But since then the trend has reversed again. The latest (February) survey from Handcraft, with January numbers, had Apache at 50.61% on a 1.04% share increase.

Apache isn't just competing with IIS, of course. Google appeared on Netcraft's survey in 2007, and had a 5,33% share in January.

And the market isn't a pie. Its size overall constantly grows. The total number of servers, Apache's included, has been sloping upward nearly every month since 1995. One exception is the current (January) report, where Netcraft notes "much slower growth".

One new open source server to watch is nginx, or "engine x". It's an open source server developed in Russia. In the Google Online Security Blog last June, nginx had a 4% share (to Apache's 66% and IIS's 23%. The nginx site currently says about 20% of Russian virtual hosts run on its server. On Netcraft it cruised past 0.5% in January.

- Doc Searls