Almost three quarters of the internet's top websites are now delivered by web servers using open source software, according to a new study.

In an analysis of the web's top 10,000 domains, researchers at web monitoring service Pingdom revealed that 74.6 per cent were utilising open source software on their web servers. According to thenextweb.com, 61 per cent were now using an Apache web service and nginx.

This is a huge improvement from the early days of the internet when many experts questioned the safety and reliability of open source web servers in their colocation data centre.

In a statement on pingdom.com, the analysts concluded that the increased use of open source web server technology could only be good news for web businesses.

It said: "Open source projects help drive web technology forward, and web servers is no exception. As a bonus, the diverse landscape we're seeing should spur on competition among the different development teams. For example, we suspect the rise of nginx has given the Apache team some extra motivation and inspiration, and vice versa."

14 per cent of the websites analysed were using Microsoft's proprietary enterprise IIS, making it the third most popular option behind Apache and nginx.