Internet ends 2008 with 186.7 million websites

Chicago (IL) – The Internet was populated with more than 186.7 million websites at the end of 2008, according to data released by Netcraft. Compared to previous years, the growth of the Internet has slowed considerably.

Netcraft said there were 186,727,854 at the end of December 2008, which translates to an increase of 1.56 million sites in November 2008 and to an increase of 31.1 million over December 2007.

In 2007, the Internet grew by 48.7 million to 155,583,825 sites; in 2006 the number climbed by 31.6 million to 106,875,138 sites. The percentage in growth is down dramatically, from 42% in 2006 and 46% in 2007 to just 17% in 2008. However, it is interesting to note that the number of websites has more than doubled since the end of 2005, when Netcraft estimated the total number of websites at 75,251,156.

Apache remains the most popular web server on the Internet with 51.24% of all websites running the software. Apache’s share declined substantially in 2007 (down from more than 60%), but has remained somewhat stable this year. Microsoft’s IIS share is estimated at 31.24%, Google at 5.6%, Nginx at 1.80% and Lighttpd at 1.63%. In absolute numbers, 95,251,327 sites are currently running Apache, 63,114,252 Microsoft IIS and 10,450,496 Google GFE.

Source: http://www.tgdaily.com