NGINX Now Powers 146 Million Websites, Launches Versions 1.6 and 1.7 Of Its Web Server

NGINX, the company behind the popular web server with the same name, today announced that it now powers more than 146 million websites. That’s up from only 96 million a year ago — a 52 percent year-over-year increase. The company says this makes it the “fastest growing web server technology on the planet.” No word about its status on nearby galaxies.

Among the top 1,000 sites on the web, almost 39 percent now use NGINX in some form (up from 31.6 percent a year ago).

The release of these numbers coincides with the launch of version 1.6 of NGINX into the product’s stable release channel and version 1.7 into the mainline channel. These releases come a few weeks after the launch of the commercial version of NGINX.

“We’ve had a great twelve months and v1.6 and 1.7 updates are just the beginning of another successful year,” said Gus Robertson, the CEO of NGINX, today. “With a strong commitment to our open-source user community, we have some major features planned that will help our users continue to benefit from NGINX’s expertise in high-performance web application delivery.”

NGINX plans to launch a couple of major improvements in the coming months. Among them are new management tools for NGINX users that will help them manage and monitor large sets of NGINX instances. The team also plans to make a number of architectural improvements to take advantage of new features in the Linux kernel. This will be particularly helpful for users who serve and cache large amounts of content (NGINX is currently being used by the likes of WordPress, Groupon, Pinterest and Tumblr, for example). The company will also soon launch a third-party module API that will allow for the dynamic loading of modules.