NGINX the Future of Web Servers?

If you’ve been keeping track of Netcraft’s web server surveys you’ve probably remembered a few trends, predictions and surprises in the last two years.

For those of you who haven’t kept track, here’s a brief recap:

• Everyone thought NGINX would overtake Microsoft as the 2nd most used web server in 2012.
• That never happened. It came awfully close to occurring in 2013, but Microsoft had a sudden increase in popularity (and market share).
• Along with Microsoft’s Rise in market share came a surprisingly quick loss in popularity for Apache.
• Towards the End of 2014 Microsoft even overtook Apache!
• After a few months on top, Microsoft returned to its 2nd place position and everything remained the same for pretty much all of 2015.

Now, we are looking at another crazy year for web servers, and it could end with Microsoft becoming the most popular web server over Apache. Microsoft’s Windows Server 2016 will determine whether Microsoft keeps its lead over Apache.

So how does all of this relate to NGINX?

As Apache and Microsoft Duke it out for the number one spot, NGINX is silently increasing it’s market share and popularity. It’s already gaining a very strong in the busiest websites, being the most popular web server in the busiest 100,000 websites.

If we take a look at the growth data from previous years, we can see that NGINX has a yearly increase of about 1.67%. It’s safe to assume that this upward trend will continue, and with Apache plummeting so quickly we predict that NGINX will overtake Apache as the number 2 web server in the next 3 years. Assuming nothing crazy happens these are our predictions for a web server market share up to 2020:

Predictions for Web Server Market Share:

By the End of 2016

Apache: 26%

Microsoft: 33%

NGINX: 17%

By the End of 2017

Apache: 23%

Microsoft: 31%

NGINX: 19%

By the End of 2018

Apache: 20%

Microsoft: 30%

NGINX: 20%

By the End of 2019

Apache: 19%

Microsoft: 30%

NGINX: 21%

By the End of 2020

Apache: 17%

Microsoft: 30%

NGINX: 23%

Obviously, these predictions could very highly. We have yet to see whether Windows Server 2016 will be a success yet (though we believe it will) and with an increasing popularity of other web servers we could see a new, and unexpected player emerge any year. Right now, the market is poised to be disrupted, and NGINX is in a good position to do so, but in theory, another web server could arrive and gain popularity too!

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