How many sites are online?
The Internet sometimes seems endless, but clearThe fact that this is not so: the number of sites on the Internet is limited by the capabilities of the servers on which these sites are hosted, and therefore it is finite, albeit very large. Whether it is possible to count up somehow, how many sites on the Internet?
British company Netcraft, specializing in web monitoring,regularly analyzes the hosting services market and among other things counts, including the number of sites in the global web. Researchers from Netcraft know exactly how many sites are on the Internet, and regularly check the dynamics of changing the number of sites on the network.
According to a study conducted in May 2012, Netcraft specialists received responses from 662 959 946 sites and blogs. Number of host names decreased by 14 million compared to April of the same year. Thus, this is the first decrease in the number of sites observed over the past 22 months.
The reason for this decline is the removal of more than 28million host names in the .info top-level domain that were hosted on SoftLayer servers (total on one hundred domains and four IP addresses). Despite this, over the past month the network appeared 1.2 million new domains.
Total number of sites and domain names, August 1995 - May 2012
Also, Netcraft leads statistics on the use of software web servers, on the basis of which websites operate.
So, the market share nginx web server has continued to grow steadily for the ninth consecutive month. Now it is 894 thousand serviced hosts (5.48% of the total number), having increased more than twice in the past year.
But the share the Apache web server this month decreased by 17.5 millionserved hosts. Nevertheless, it still ranks first in popularity, leading the market by a wide margin: two-thirds of all sites use this web server.
It also turned out that 654 hosts as a web server use Microsoft-IIS / 8.0, the default Web server in the new server OS from Microsoft is Windows Server 2012, formerly known under the code name Windows Server 8.
Market share of web servers, August 1995 - May 2012
| Web server | April 2012 | Share of | May 2012 | Share of | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 443,102,561 | 65.46% | 425,631,721 | 64.20% | -1.26 |
| Microsoft | 92,488,751 | 13.66% | 92,406,480 | 13.94% | 0.28 |
| nginx | 69,869,916 | 10.32% | 70,764,248 | 10.67% | 0.35 |
| 22,039,901 | 3.26% | 21,264,616 | 3.21% | -0.05 |
As you can see, it is rather difficult to say exactly how many sites on the Internet: the number of them is constantly changing, and to know a more or less exact number, you needfollow the reports of Netcraft. With certainty, we can say only one thing: against the background of the total number of more than 600 million sites, all the fluctuations in the number of sites seem rather insignificant.
