How many websites are there?

Trying to find some decent resources for some general internet stats...

[sitemaker]

Howdee People,

Just wondered if anyone knew of some decent resources out there where I might find some half accurate figures and info on stuff like the number of websites online and the increase of websites over the last say 10 years etc etc etc...for some internal bull#*$! I've got to write for the people upstairs.

[trillianjedi]

According to Wikipedia there are 80 million websites. What's unclear is whether they're just counting domains or actual websites. If just domain counting, it'll be much less than that.

As to growth rates etc, have you checked Neilson/Netratings?

Might be worth a trawl through their press releases as I'm sure I've seen snippets of info about this from them over the years.

They also have an "Ages of the Internet" document which you might find useful (although not related to your question, it does relate to general internet stats):-

[nielsen-netratings.com...]

It might also be worth contacting the web consortium:-

[w3.org...]

If anyone would know where to point you to, I would think it's them.

TJ

[lammert]

According to Netcraft, the current amount of known hostnames is 77,568,868. This is pretty close to the wikipedia number and they probably use the same source. These are existing hostnames, not active sites. The number of active sites is somewhere around 37,000,000 according to their March 2006 survey. The other hostnames resolve to parked pages.

Netcraft also has graphs on their sites showing the growth of the number of websites since 1995 and a graph with the relative number of sites per http server type (apache, IIS, etc). I don't know if it is allowed to post a link to them.

[trillianjedi]

Good find lammert. I think we can safely call that an authority site and post the link:-

[news.netcraft.com...]

Great data - very interesting.