netcraft

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.