CNN reports Over 100,000,000 Websites: A Walk Through History

A source at Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has been tracking the growth of websites for over 10 years, has informed CNN that there are 100 million websites on the Internet. A little less than half of that are sites that are “busy and updated often.”

Surprised? I’m not. Technorati says it’s tracking 58.6 million blogs. 100 million in comparison is not such a big jump (even though the larger number tracks distinct hostnames, and a lot of blogs are on subdomains, e.g. something.typepad.com).

Netcraft provides even more interesting data in their own blog giving the breakdown of the types of web hosts. I’m not surprised with these results either, although the not-so-technically savvy individual might be wondering what an Apache is. For me and my line of work, having Apache at over 60% of the market share is expected (and for me, preferred). I can’t emphasize the ease of setting up sites on Apache (on Linux, more particularly) — but I’ll save that for a later post. It is a little shocking that the numbers have dropped in the past months, but hey, the term Microsoft is familiar to every household, and as sites grow and new hosting companies solicit their services, a lot of people are likely to turn to a Microsoft server because it’s a name they are used to.

The history and progression of the article and the Netcraft article is really interesting. We have made such great technological strides in less than 15 years. Affordable computers and the ease of developing websites has contributed to the growth. I remember coding by hand in 1996, modifying HTML files, just to pick up the basics. I used Allaire (now Macromedia) Homesite for a good chunk of time before and after spending a summer developing sites at American Home Guides. Then I stopped programming and did more technical/infrastructure stuff. It’s interesting to look back and see that as I was learning, the Internet was growing — and now we’ve hit 100 million.

This was my second website which I developed by hand in 1998. (My first website was at the same address and didn’t make the Wayback Machine. Given that I was just learning HTML at that time, I’m kind of happy about that.)

Got any old websites to share?

Image Source: Netcraft