Companies Using OpenResty

I run the crawler that reads these headers, and OpenResty is the clearest case I know of a count that's true and still easy to misread. A domain counts here when the Server header in our crawler's response names OpenResty. In our October 2026 crawl that's 763,880 domains once parking and error pages are removed, 341,117 of them matched to a company, 4th of 70 in Web Servers. On 12 October I went back over samples by hand, reading headers and DNS, to see whose server was answering.

What the header can tell you

The Server header names the machine that built the response, and an operator can change it. On a modern site that machine often isn't the owner's. bp.com answers through Amazon CloudFront with an OpenResty origin behind it. Lenovo's storefront answers through Akamai. CERN's home.cern reports openresty/1.27.1.2 from its own servers. Same word in the header, three different setups.

Sales signal: an OpenResty detection tells you about a site's edge, not who chose it. Before pitching hosting, CDN or security tools, find out whether the header belongs to the company or to its host.

Almost a quarter of the raw count was parking

I counted the last page titles our crawler recorded for live OpenResty domains. The most common by a wide margin was "Redirecting...", on 162,693 domains. In a random sample of 25 of them, 18 no longer resolved and the other 7 sat on parking servers: five in one cloud range and two on a lander that forwards visitors to a /lander page. Add 6,100 "502 Bad Gateway" pages, 12,062 domains sharing one Chinese-language title and the for-sale landers, and we removed 236,436 of 1,000,316 raw live domains, 23.6%. The same filter took 1.8% from Nginx and 0.24% from Apache, so this is an OpenResty problem, not a crawl-wide one.

"Almost a quarter of the domains announcing OpenResty were parking or error pages. The header is real, but often there's no website behind it." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: the 763,880 on this page already excludes those pages, but 100,834 domains had no title at all, and they stay in. Check untitled domains before you build a list from this technology.

Header turnover, not churn

Our records show 674,630 domains that dropped the OpenResty header since we began tracking it in March 2026, counted on the raw set with parked domains included. Those are hostnames moving on and off OpenResty edges, not companies abandoning a web server: a proxy added or removed, a site moved to another host, a parked domain expiring. In a random sample of 104 live domains, 18 no longer resolved and 16 already answered with a different server, ten of them LiteSpeed. Only about 2% of the dropped domains still show OpenResty on another hostname. Our IIS research saw the same thing from the other side: domains that switched between IIS and OpenResty were mostly a proxy flipping in front of an unchanged site.

Our raw monthly counts move for those reasons and two of ours: 683,481 in June, 967,927 in July. The domains we crawl turn over every month, with dead sites dropping out and new ones added, and our detection widens over time. The cleaned count exists for October only.

Sales signal: don't read a lost OpenResty header as a migration you can sell into. Read it as a hosting change, and check the new header before you call.

The platforms behind the header

Among working sites, no two or three hosts explain the count. In the 104-domain sample, 26 working sites answered with OpenResty, spread over more than a dozen providers. The patterns show up in the company list instead. Nine of its university sites, including Penn State, Georgia Tech and the University of Chicago, resolve to CampusPress, a WordPress host for education. Careers sites for Textron, Alaska Airlines, Sci Corp and C&S Wholesale Grocers resolve to one shared careers-site server, and Miele's and Heidelberg Materials' run on job-shop.com. The data portals of Caisse des Dépôts and Banque de France run on Opendatasoft. In Central Europe, sites hosted by Websupport and stores on Shoptet answered with OpenResty, which helps explain why Czechia (7,667) and Slovakia (5,673) make the top 15 here and not on our Nginx or LiteSpeed profiles.

Sales signal: for vendors selling to universities or HR teams, the hosting platform is the account. One CampusPress or careers-platform relationship covers many of the enterprise rows on this page.

Who the matched companies are

70.14% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees, more than on our Nginx (65.49%) or LiteSpeed (66.94%) profiles. Construction leads the industries at 4.37%, Restaurants and Medical Practices make the top ten, and 59.05% of companies were founded in 2010 or later. Small local firms, in other words. The 2,426 companies above 1,000 staff split two ways: Western enterprises whose header comes from a vendor-run property, and Chinese companies such as Huawei, Xiaomi, ZTE, Meituan and Ping An that show it on their own domains. China ranks 10th with 6,994 matched companies, and OpenResty's about page credits Taobao and Yahoo! China as its first sponsors.

Sales signal: the small-business majority buys hosting, not web servers, so reach them through their host or builder. The Chinese enterprise group is the part of this list most likely to run OpenResty by choice.

The stack around it

WordPress runs on 22.54% of OpenResty domains and Google Analytics on 28.14%, both far below Nginx's profile (47.93% and 45.32%). Removing the parking pages raised both figures, from 17.86% and 22.93% on the raw set, but the gap to Nginx stayed wide, so parking doesn't explain it. Google Cloud CDN appears on 13.07%, Naver Analytics on 2.48% and Baidu Analytics on 1.09%. Ruby on Rails (2.5%) is the most common framework we see under it. The base for these percentages is the 763,873 domains in our cleaned live set.

"When WordPress and Google Analytics are scarce on a web server's domains, count the parked pages first. Here, even after we took them out, OpenResty sites looked less like WordPress builds than Nginx's." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: Rails, Next.js (1.33%) and Express (0.66%) sites behind OpenResty are the developer-run minority. They're the right list for observability, API-gateway or web application firewall tools.

What OpenResty costs

The software is free. OpenResty's about page says it bundles components under BSD-style licences, and openresty.org lists 1.31.1.1 as the latest release. OpenResty Inc. sells OpenResty Edge, a gateway product offered through a demo and free trial, and OpenResty XRay for troubleshooting and profiling.

Sales signal: there's no licence fee to displace, so selling against OpenResty means selling operational help: managed gateways, observability, or a CDN that takes over the edge.

Key takeaways

1. 763,880 domains after cleaning, 4th of 70 in Web Servers with 5.28%, counted from the Server header.

2. 23.6% of the raw count was parking, for-sale and error pages, against 1.8% for Nginx.

3. The 674,630 drops since March are hostname turnover on the raw set, not customer churn.

4. Enterprise rows often trace to a vendor: CampusPress, careers platforms, open-data portals.

5. Czechia and Slovakia rank higher here than on Nginx's or LiteSpeed's profiles, helped by local hosts.

How to use this list

Check untitled domains first, then filter by company size and country. For the full list of 763,880 OpenResty domains with company and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io. Our guide to technology detection methods covers how header-based signals like this one differ from script detections.