Load Balancer

Santa might have decided to give Nginx a nicely wrapped present a little bit later this year as recently the open source upstart was named in Netcraft’s January 2012 Web Server Survey as the second most widely used Web server for all Active Sites, gaining 1.9 million and overtaking Microsoft (News - Alert). While Apache continues to dominate the Web server space, Nginx’s ability to creep to the second spot means big things for the upstart.

And if that wasn’t enough for bragging rights, Nginx also saw the second largest absolute growth with an addition of 6.9 million hostnames. Moreover, as opposed to its competitor like Apache, Microsoft and Google (News - Alert), it was the only major Web server vendor to gain market share this month, setting a new all-time high of 9.63 percent.

Having only been founded last July, Nginx has already made quite a dent in the market since it was created by Igor Sysoev. The platform, which debuted in 2004, was designed to address high-volume Web traffic. It currently operates on some 25 percent of the world's 1,000 busiest websites, including Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, Hulu, Dropbox (News - Alert), and WordPres. Nginx is the commercial arm of NGINX.

For the past 10 years, NGINX, authored by Sysoev, has grown significantly but has never strayed from its founding principle that Internet usage will explode with an increasing expectation of instant response from online services.

NGINX was designed to allow companies to adjust to this new reality of heavy Internet consumption without incurring unnecessary costs in capital investments or time, according to company officials. In the past decade, NGINX has developed into a flexible and scalable Internet infrastructure software, which includes a Web server for static and dynamic content, Layer 7 load-balancing, reverse proxy for HTTP, SMTP, IMAP and POP3, caching engine and SSL offloading.

According to Netcraft, Nginx runs on 12.18 percent of all active websites, or sites that display unique content and aren't generated from templates. During its January 2012 survey, Netcraft found over 582 million websites, about 18 million of which were active.

At the start of last December, Nginx ran on 11.6 percent of active sites (around 20.3 million in total) which illustrates that the open source platform's share jumped 0.57 percent. One of its main competitors, Microsoft IIS, now runs on 12.14 percent of active websites, for a total of around 22.1 million. That represents a 0.17 percent drop compared to its December standing, when the platform powered 12.31 percent of active websites for a total of about 21.6 million, according to reports.

The survey also revealed that among the world's one million busiest sites, Apache holds a market share of 64.4 percent (640,547 sites), down 0.36 percent since December; Microsoft's share is 14.99 percent (149,209 sites), down 0.01 percent; Nginx represents 8.49 percent (84,541 sites), up 0.28 percent month over month; and Google handles 2.4 percent (23,894 sites), an increase of 0.09 percent.