Guess How Many Websites Have Been on the Internet???

Netcraft has been publishing since February of 2003 and has given us a good indication of who is hosting the most sites and which is the preferred hosting software. Can you guess how many sites are out there?

Netcraft's latest survey revealed 525,998,433 sites in total. However, not all of them are activy; only 172 million are in active use. These numbers compare to 463,000,317 sites and 170 million active sites just two months ago.

If we travel back in time, we find that there were just 35,863,952 in February of 2003 and just 105.2 million in December of 2006. As far as the plain number of sites is concerned, the web has about quintupled in less than five years. For 2011 alone, the Internet has almost doubled the number of its sites as Netcraft reported only 273,301,445 sites in January of this year.

Apache is, by a wide margin, the most popular web hosting software with a share of 65.0 percent. Microsoft IIS follows with 15.5 percent. Nginx has 8.5 percent and Google 3.37 percent.