How we got from 1 to 162 million websites on the internet
According to the latest numbers, there are more than 162 million websites on the internet today. We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 websites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 websites. Not much need for Google in those days…
So how has the number of websites grown over time? Here is how we got from 1 to 162 million websites:
The graph covers December 1990 to March 2008.
The early growth is difficult to see in the graph, so here is a table showing how long it took before the web grew to 100,000 websites:
| Date | Number of websites |
|---|---|
| Dec 90 | 1 |
| Dec 91 | 10 |
| Dec 92 | 50 |
| Jun 93 | 130 |
| Sep 93 | 204 |
| Oct 93 | 228 |
| Dec 93 | 623 |
| Jun 94 | 2,738 |
| Dec 94 | 10,022 |
| Jun 95 | 23,500 |
| Jan 96 | 100,000 |
Hey, Pingdom could have monitored the uptime of the entire World Wide Web back then! 
The world’s first website
Wonder about that one, single website back in December of 1990? That was info.cern.ch, the first-ever website and web server, created by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW).
It’s amazing how the web has gone from consisting of just this first little web page to the huge network of millions and millions of websites that it is today, and how pervasive the web has become in our society. We do our banking online, read our news online, have our encyclopedias online, meet friends online. And all this has happened since 1990.
Notes on the numbers
The definition of what counts as a website varies, but the numbers here are hostnames connected to sites that respond. The numbers from Netcraft (August 1995 and onward) include parked pages as well, so it is larger than the number of “active” websites.
Some of the data was taken from Hobbes’ Internet Timeline and then complemented with Netcraft data.
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Gerry Scheetz
April 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Could you make a logarithmic graph with the same data. That would be interesting to see.
foobar
April 4th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Very interesting information. I referred to your post here in my blog at: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/4831
Rick Wolff
April 4th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Note that 3 out of 4 sites came online after the “boom” of 2000, and the “bust” only flattened the growth for about 18 months.
Nestor
April 12th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
But how many are worth visiting? Answer, not very many indeed.
nukemdomis
June 17th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
We need more websites. 162 million sites is just not enough. I wonder how many of those sites expire every day.
If one were to create a text document that listed all 162 million sites that document would be approximately 10,500,000 pages long. Even 1 million sites as a text document would be a massive 65,000 pages long.
Albert James
July 24th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Do you know what percentage of sites are inventor or technology promotionally based? It would give me a clue of pricing plus projecting a cooperative style member site. Thank you for posting this much…
Sadece Bir Blog
August 17th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Robert Cailliau, collaborator on the World Wide Web project and first Web surfer. That was interesting
ID
November 30th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Interesting statistics on the number of new websites…….it should be interesting to see the growth in the next 5 years.