Success Factors of an Open Source Outsider: the Case of Nginx Web Server

Nginx is an event­driven Web server published in 2004 and designed for high­traffic websites. Despite the dominant position of Apache HTTP reaching nearly 70% market share, Nginx succeeded in gaining nearly 15% market shares. We studied the success factors of the Nginx Web server and compared the two main open source competitors: the reference software (Apache HTTP) and the second event­driven outsider (Lighttpd). In particular we highlight the importances of the reliability of Nginx compared to Lighttpd and of the complementary with Apache HTTP leading Web server.