China just officially climbed to the top position in the supercomputer performance race. You may have read that the country now has the fastest, and also the third fastest, supercomputer in the world.

But this was no overnight success. It’s been a long race for China to get there. Back in the 90s, China’s presence in the supercomputer top 500 was almost non-existent, so most of this progress has happened in the last decade.

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It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.

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The world is a big place, but so is the Internet. We know which countries are the largest in the real world, but what about on the Internet?

This article examines which countries are the largest in terms of Internet users, and will also look into their growth potential. That last point is very interesting to look at, because it’s an indication of how the power balance on the Internet might shift in the future.

But before we head on to the charts, let’s start with a few interesting findings.

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We hear mostly about the social networking sites where English is the predominant language, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But what about those sites where the vast majority of users don’t speak or use English? We don’t hear about those very much.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. And many are doing extremely well. One of them is even big enough to rival Facebook in sheer user count.

The social networking sites we list below have reached an overwhelming popularity outside of the (native) English-speaking population, often being local hits in one or just a few countries and a specific language.

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Baidu, which is China’s equivalent to Google, has been unavailable since 09:50 this morning, Central European Time. That is more than five hours and counting as of this writing.

The problem might be related to the so-called Great Firewall of China, since it seems like the website is accessible from within China (we performed a test with a proxy server located within China). However, none of the Pingdom test servers in Europe or North America are able to access the site.

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There is no denying that there are some significant cultural differences between East and West. Since we here at Pingdom deal a lot with web hosting companies and are generally interested in the hosting industry, we have on occasion stumbled upon some Asian hosting websites which to our Western eyes have a very different look [...]

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The US has long held a dominating position in the web hosting industry. One way to examine this is to look at which DNS servers hold the most domain names. It turns out that 16 of the 20 largest DNS servers in the world are located in the US. Aside from the US, only Germany [...]

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David Rydell from Pingdom has just spent two days at the SIME conference to follow up on the latest trends and the future of the Internet. From the SIME homepage: SIME (Scandinavian Interactive Media Event) is not about visions and dreams but focuses on how Internet and the evolving digital environment changes the world we [...]

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