In the February 2014 survey we received responses from 920,102,079 sites — over 58 million more than last month.

Microsoft gained a staggering 48 million sites this month, increasing its total by 19% — most of this growth is attributable to new sites hosted by Nobis Technology Group. Along with Microsoft, nginx also made a large gain of 14 million sites, whereas Apache fell by 7 million. Unsurprisingly, these changes have had a dramatic effect on the overall market share of each web server vendor, with Microsoft's share growing by 3.38 percentage points to 32.8% (302 million sites) while Apache's has fallen by 3.41 to 38.2% (352 million sites).

Microsoft's market share is now only 5.4 percentage points lower than Apache's, which is the closest it has ever been. If recent trends continue, Microsoft could overtake Apache within the next few months, ending Apache's 17+ year reign as the most common web server. Apache is faring much better in both the active sites and top million sites datasets, however, where it is still dominating with just over half of the market share in both metrics.