Open Source nginx Surpasses Microsoft as the Second Most Used Web Server

The second most popular web server on the planet does not belong anymore to Microsoft, nginx (pronounced Engine X) gained the silver medal starting this January, according to new data from Netcraft.

nginx, an open source web server first created years ago by Igor Sysoev for the website Rambler.ru, the second most visited site in Russia, currently runs 12,18% of active sites across all domains, while Microsoft IIS has a 12,14% share, the Internet statistics firm, Netcraft reported.

The other open source server, Apache, stays stable at 57,93% of total usage for active sites.

Several websites run on nginx, including top Russian websites Rambler, Yandex, V kontakte and Kaspersky, but you can find nginx in the architecture of Facebook, Groupon, Slideshare, Dropbox and Opera as well.

The Russia-based Open Source company behind nginx will start to provide commercial support for small, medium and large enterprises, additionally, in October 2011, the company was able to obtain more than $3 million in investments from Runa Capital, BV Capital and MSD Capital private foundation, which belongs to Michael Dell, Dell's general manager.

On the other hand, Microsoft seems skeptical of the statistics, denying that nginx can be actually seen as more popular than Microsoft's IIS. Gajdar Magdanurov, web evangelist at Microsoft, said that nginx is often used together with IIS, when the IIS server performs most of the work and nginx is rather utilized in the process of providing final results to users. Even though, Magdanurov confirmed that nginx is becoming more popular.