Last week we published an article declaring that NGINX had become the second most used web server software in the world, thereby overtaking Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

In that article, based on figures from Netcraft’s Web Server Survey, we looked at the data for “active sites.” NGINX had in that category pulled ahead of IIS for the first time, even though it was by a slim margin. NGINX accounted for 22,221,514 servers and IIS accounted for 22,142,114.

As we noted then, if you instead look at Netcraft’s “Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains,” NGINX is still behind IIS. The margin is substantial but closing. We stated that NGINX might take the number two spot even in that category this year.

Now, let’s find out if that can happen and if so, when.

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In the latest Netcraft Web Server for January 2012, the lightweight open source web server software NGINX amassed more active sites than Microsoft Internet Information Server for the first time.

That makes NGINX the second more used web server software in the world right now, only trumped by Apache.

Let’s look at the numbers.

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There are millions upon millions of blogs available today, and many of them are hosted on dedicated blogging services. These kinds of services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for WordPress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr.

One of the main benefits of using a blogging service is that they make blogging easy. There’s no need to deal with traditional hosting. You blog, the blogging service keeps your content available online.

In theory, blogging services should also be able to make your blog more reliable since they have a lot of servers at their disposal, often spread across multiple data centers. If your blog gets flooded by traffic (usually a good thing), a blogging service has a much better chance handling it since your traffic is just a drop in the ocean for them. Had you been on a single server (or even a shared one), your site might not have coped.

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Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.

Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.

One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.

There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.

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There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s iPad is the biggest seller in the tablet space, but we have seen many iPad competitors come out over recent months, including Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Blackberry PlayBook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and many more.

However, despite all these Android tablets, according to comScore in October 2011, 95.5% of all tablet web traffic in the U.S. comes from iPad.

That is a stunning number. So, is anyone really buying all these shipping Android tablets, and what do people do with them after they buy them? Because they don’t seem to be surfing the Web.

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The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

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The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you want to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

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The growth of the microblogging platform Tumblr has been nothing short of amazing. The increase in users and overall attention the service is getting is reminiscent of when Twitter took off. There are now almost 28 million blogs on Tumblr. A year ago there were seven million.

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Tumblr users will soon have cranked out a whopping 10 billion posts. That’s a huge milestone for Tumblr. At the current rate of more than 37 million posts per day, this should happen in about a week.

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In just a couple of years, Google Chrome has firmly established itself as a web browser to be reckoned with. Where once you spoke of Internet Explorer and Firefox as the two big ones, these days the duo has become a trio. The browser wars are back. Chrome has started to edge out Firefox in some countries, and as you will see in this article, there are actually countries where it’s already become number one.

This is where South America comes into the picture. Nowhere is Chrome more successful than in that part of the world.

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Apple earned a massive profit of $419,528 per employee in the past 12 months. That beats Google, Microsoft, Intel and a bunch of other big tech companies by quite some margin.

One reason (of several) that profit per employee is such an interesting metric is because it gives you a number that doesn’t depend so much on the size of the company. In other words, it becomes easy to compare companies of different sizes.

We have calculated the yearly profit per employee for a selection of big tech companies that are publicly traded on NYSE and NASDAQ: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, HP, Dell.

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