The Web Now Has Over 500 Million Websites

The web has been growing like crazy for a long time, since it first launched actually, but it has now reached a new record high. As of the start of October 2011, there are 500 million websites online, according to the latest Netcraft data.

That's an important milestone, but even more impressive is the growth spur for the past year, since there were half as many websites only a year ago.

"In the October 2011 survey we received responses from 504,082,040 sites, a growth of nearly 3.8% or around 18M sites on last month," Netcraft wrote.

"All of the main web server vendors gained hostnames this month with Apache again showing the largest increase of just over 10M; however, it continues to lose a small amount of market share," it added.

"A gain of just over 4M hostnames sees nginx increase market share to an all-time high of 8.5%," it said.

Note that the 500 million websites figure is the total number of sites detected by the survey. The number of active sites, i.e. the ones in actual use, is significantly smaller, though impressive in its own right.

The discrepancy between active sites, as measured and defined by Netcraft, and the total number of sites detected comes from those sites that are created by registrars, hosting companies and, well, spammers, but which don't have original content.

Taking out automatically generated sites, leaves just 151,277,928 active sites.

In terms of active sites, Apache lost 86,000 sites this past month, just 0.1 percent of its total, but leaving it with a market share loss of 1.09 percent.

Nginx saw the biggest rise, adding 1.6 million active sites for a market share bump of 11.28 percent. With this latest spike, nginx is getting very close to Microsoft's market share.