The World Wide Web would be nothing without web servers, and Apache has been king of that hill for a long time now. Although its market share has been slipping a bit in recent years, Apache came back with a vengeance in 2010.

This became abundantly clear as we examined the growth of the top five web servers during the past year, from December 2009 to December 2010. As you’ll see, Apache really had a great year.

Web growth in 2010

Before we go into the details about each web server, here are some key numbers for how the Web changed in 2010, courtesy of Netcraft:

• By the end of 2010, the Internet had a total of 255 million websites.
• Compared to 2009, that’s an increase by 9%, or 21.4 million websites.

So basically, the Web keeps growing by leaps and bounds. It would have actually been a much higher number by 30 million or so if it weren’t for the fact that the Netcraft’s December 2009 number included the blogs from Tencent’s QQ, which are no longer included in the survey.

Web server growth in 2010

And now how web server usage changed in 2010:

• Apache went from hosting 109 million websites in 2009, to almost 152 million by the end of 2010.
• Net result: Almost 43 million new Apache websites in 2010.
• Microsoft IIS went from hosting 49 million websites in 2009, to almost 57 million by the end of 2010.
• Net result: Almost 8 million new IIS websites in 2010.
• Nginx failed to show the same explosive growth as it did in 2009, going from 16.2 to 16.9 million websites in 2010.
• Google’s web server (primarily for Blogger) went from 14.1 to 14.9 million websites in 2010.
• Lighttpd went from 840 thousand to 1.3 million websites.

Or better yet, let’s illustrate this with a chart:

You can clearly see how strong the past year has been for Apache. The number of Apache-hosted websites has grown by almost 40% in just one year.

Market share changes in 2010

To complement the numbers above, here is how the market share for each web server changed in 2010:

• Apache went from 46.6% to 59.4%, a massive gain of 12.8%.
• Microsoft IIS went from 21.0% to 22.2%, a 1.2% gain.
• Nginx went from 6.6% to 7.0%.
• Google’s web server went from 6.0% to 5.9%.
• Lighttpd went from 0.4% to 0.5%.

Just as the chart indicated, while the market share of IIS and nginx grew only moderately, Apache got a big boost.

Conclusion

This article shows that Apache is pulling away from its “arch enemy, ” Microsoft’s IIS. In December 2009 there were 2.2 times as many Apache websites as there were IIS websites. In December 2010 Apache had 2.7 times as many websites as IIS.

Apache is arguably one of the most emphatic open source successes, a product that has consistently since its birth been the preferred web server for millions upon millions of webmasters. Unless something drastic happens, it will remain dominant for a long time to come.

Data source: Netcraft

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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