The Number of Websites Doubled in 2011, to Reach 582 Million

The year ended with 582,716,657 as measured by Netcraft. That's a big growth from the previous month, December 2011 started with 27.2 million less websites.

But the 4.9 percent growth is nothing compared to the entire year, there were only 255 million websites detected at the start of 2011. The number has more than doubled in the past year, indicating an intensive activity.

Apache lead the way for the last month and the year. In December it added 16 million new hostnames. However, it's market share dropped 0.3 percent points. This is because nginx once again saw a big growth in the last month.

"In terms of Active Sites, nginx gained 1.9M which resulted in it overtaking Microsoft to have the second largest number of Active Sites (22.2M). Apache experienced the greatest rise this month with an addition of 3.7M Active Sites," Netcraft explained.