So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

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Last week we published an article declaring that NGINX had become the second most used web server software in the world, thereby overtaking Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

In that article, based on figures from Netcraft’s Web Server Survey, we looked at the data for “active sites.” NGINX had in that category pulled ahead of IIS for the first time, even though it was by a slim margin. NGINX accounted for 22,221,514 servers and IIS accounted for 22,142,114.

As we noted then, if you instead look at Netcraft’s “Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains,” NGINX is still behind IIS. The margin is substantial but closing. We stated that NGINX might take the number two spot even in that category this year.

Now, let’s find out if that can happen and if so, when.

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In the latest Netcraft Web Server for January 2012, the lightweight open source web server software NGINX amassed more active sites than Microsoft Internet Information Server for the first time.

That makes NGINX the second more used web server software in the world right now, only trumped by Apache.

Let’s look at the numbers.

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Apache is still the undisputed king of web server software but according to the latest Netcraft Web Server Survey from November 2011, NGINX usage has grown almost 300% over the last year.

In real numbers NGINX increased from about 15 million sites a year ago to 43 million in November 2011. That’s a faster growth than any other web server software tracked by Netcraft.

Since we’re big fans of NGINX at Pingdom, we wanted to try to understand this tremendous growth, so we put some questions to Andrew Alexeev (Q&A further down). Andrew looks after Business Development and Marketing for NGINX Inc., the company formed in October this year, backed by $3 million in venture funding, with the intent to expand the open source NGINX project and explore commercial opportunities.

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Apache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground.

It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

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Building websites and web applications today is not only about being a great programmer, it’s even more important to be a smart programmer. This means to re-use existing code and applications when possible instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Open source has been around for ages and much of the web is built using it. Every developer knows about Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP).

But what about all the other open source projects out there? As a web developer you can save lots of time or optimize the performance of your applications by using many of the other projects that are available.

Lets take a look on what’s out there, free for everyone to use.

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The World Wide Web would be nothing without web servers, and Apache has been king of that hill for a long time now. Although its market share has been slipping a bit in recent years, Apache came back with a vengeance in 2010.

This became abundantly clear as we examined the growth of the top five web servers during the past year, from December 2009 to December 2010. As you’ll see, Apache really had a great year.

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RESTful APIs have become increasingly popular both among web services and developers and are easy to serve up with the same software used for regular web pages. In May of 2010, 74% of web APIs used REST as their protocol.

When setting up servers for a REST API it can make sense to use a web server software that is a bit more lightweight than what you’d use for a full-blown website. The gains are, at least in theory, that each API server that way could handle more requests since it would be less taxing on system resources.

But is that what actually happens, or do most web services just put up an Apache server, same as they would do for a regular website?

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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When it comes to web server software, Apache has been king of the hill for a long time. It currently has about 54% of the market. This is followed by Microsoft’s IIS, with about 24% of the market. Then, surprisingly, a new contender has started to rise, and it’s coming out of Russia: nginx (pronounced “engine x”).

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