Cloudflare overtakes Apache and Nginx to become most commonly used web server | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare overtakes Apache and Nginx to become most commonly used web server

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33 pointstosh30 comments

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It's some bad news for the decentralized web.

Just shows what ease of use can do for a service.

This is the actual report:

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2023/01/27/january-2023-w...

The graphics shown on the bird site are labelled “market share of the top million sites”

So IMHO the tweet is a bit confusing

Cloudflare is a reverse proxy to Apache or Nginx right?

It's still a web server in its own right though, same as when Nginx or Apache are used to proxy to Node etc.

Sure, but in practice most people probably use Cloudflare with Nginx/Apache. They are more like complements, rather than substitutes.

They don’t use nginx anymore

Whether or not Cloudflare themselves use Nginx any more is quite beside the point. My point was that most people in the world using Cloudflare proxy service don't use it on its own, people still use a webserver like Nginx/Apache behind it, so the original tweet doesn't really make sense.

They've recently built their own proxy [1], not sure how much of their total traffic it handles though.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t...

Netcraft confirms it: Apache and Nginx are dying.

For clarity,

  > Cloudflare was basically nginx (and is
    still on many datacenters) before they
    built the [sic] own webserver upon
    rust.

https://twitter.com/hakaan72/status/1619118211747946496

This is the response from Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. Terrible look. https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1619071574744907776

How is that a terrible look? Cloudflare isn't slowing down. That's all he says.

can't see it as a good thing

a] good luck launching new web search engine

b] spof

What about httpd? (Sarcasm)

Apache serving 21%?! What kind of websites use Apache in 2022? I haven't deployed a site on that dinosaur in over a decade at this rate. Nor have I used it as a reverse proxy in that timeframe.

> I haven't deployed a site on that dinosaur in over a decade at this rate

That's why your memory of Apache is a dinosaur itself: Apache has been constantly improving over the years. The advantage that Nginx had in performance was gone with Apache introducing event mpm. Now event mpm + any backend can provide you the same performance with Nginx, but with ALL the benefit of the gigantic module ecosystem that Apache has.

Like another commenter said, merely WordPress would constitute around ~50% of the web, and it uses Apache. Even if there is a nginx proxy cache at the front (as is so common with run of the mill web hosts that use cPanel), the Apache in the backend is irreplaceable - modifying .htaccess file is critical to many !very! important plugins in the WP ecosystem that people use to run their businesses. And if a web host does not provide for that, they remain gimped. You can use Nginx for WordPress, but then you will have to get non-technical users to add mod rewrite rules through a web panel or something. Good luck explaining what a 'rewrite rule' is to a non-technical user who just wants to launch an ecommerce site for his flower shop. Less, any regex that needs to be used for some specific rules...

WordPress pretty much requires Apache and is a very big chunk of the web.

Actually, WordPress works with Nginx but it's less plug and play than Apache, so many people are still going to use Apache, even if they put Nginx in front of it. Apache implements stuff Nginx intentionally doesn't, but this stuff is still useful in some scenarios.

https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/nginx/

Not true I've run nginx for clients with WordPress setups for close to 10y now.

Read my comment again. You can, but it's less plug and play and therefore, most people are going to use Apache.

"WordPress pretty much requires Apache and is a very big chunk of the web."

That isn't true. It doesn't require Apache.

> WordPress pretty much requires Apache and is a very big chunk of the web.

Wordpress requires a web server and PHP. If you have nginx configured to run PHP, you can drop wordpress in a folder and it will just work™.

A lot of prominent plugins require the ability to modify .htaccess. With Nginx hosts, the users have to do it via a web panel by adding the rules manually. No non-technical user can do that. So the majority of WP space still runs behind Apache.

I'm not certain, but that sounds sketchy.

Its not. Literally almost ~50% of the web runs on it. Apache has top level permissions. Then individual virtual hosts/sites can modify their own htaccess per the permissions that they are afforded. These permissions are generally limited, but when it comes to mod rewrite, they have pretty much full liberty to write any rewrite rule. Since their rewrites would affect just their own vhosts anyways.

Works like a clock. And its extremely convenient even for developers. Anything ranging from seo friendly urls to anti-bot/security rules can be written in by a plugin.

Not htaccess, rather allowing your webapp to write to htaccess.

No .htaccess with rewrite rules for wp?

Which rules?

That probably explains everything! I've never deployed WordPress, but it's everywhere! Thanks

Do you use cat or ls? Those tools were written like 40 years ago

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