61% of the top 10k sites on the web are served by open source projects Apache and nginx

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom analyzed the top 10,000 websites on the web and unsurprisingly found out that 74.6% of them are served on web servers run by open source software.

While it’s not surprising, it’s definitely impressive. Even more impressive is that Apache web service and nginx are used by 61% of the top 10k sites on the Web. Microsoft’s enterprise offering, which is of course not open source, IIS, is used by 14% of the sites that Pingdom checked out.

Just in case those numbers don’t resonate with you in print, here’s a graphical representation of open source’s absolute dominance:

While the type of server software a company might run depends on the needs of its product, it does appear that more companies are turning to open source solutions than ever. I remember a time, about five years ago, where I was laughed out of many meetings and discussions when I pushed open source as a reliable, safe, and stable option to run web servers.

Guess people caught on finally, eh?