Obscure Chinese web servers at the end of your connections? It's legit, and growing

Netcraft has issued an update to its regular rating of the world's most-used web servers and found two Chinese nginx forks on the rise.

The usual suspects top the charts: Apache's out in front with 86,528,264 active sites, a 49.99 per cent market share. nginx's 27,855,455 users give it 16.09 per cent share. Microsoft and Google come in third and fourth with 9.99 per cent and 7.62 per cent respectively.

Alibaba's nginx fork - Tengine – is now used by 42 million sites, but few are active. Baidu, a Chinese analog for Google, is also making a splash with its “yunjiasu-nginx” server. Numbers are still small – the server has won just 108,000 active sites – but adoption has grown by by a factor of five since August 2015 and the server is now in Netcraft's top ten.

Growth in Chinese web server prevalence is to be expected because both Baidu and Alibaba are expanding their cloud computing operations. Both companies clearly feel that using their own web servers confers an advantage of some sort.

Tengine is yours for the downloading here, but yunjiasu-nginx is harder to find. It is, however, worth trying to learn more about the server thanks to China's policy of asking western IT concerns to work with locals rather than just setting up Middle Kingdom outposts. That policy's seen content delivery network CloudFlare partner with Baidu, the source of yunjiasu-nginx, for site-delivery speeding in China. If you're seeing yunjiasu-nginx pop up in logs, its likely because you've seen some traffic originating at Baidus' cloud, or because of the CloudFlare tie-up.

So don't panic, sysadmins: these Chinese web servers are legit, have excellent bloodlines and are likely to appear more often in future. ®