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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Swedish hosting provider Binero has announced that it has DNSSEC-signed all of its customers’ .se domains. This brings the total amount of signed .se domains to more than 100,000 from the previous total of 5,000.

“Nearly one in ten Swedish domains are now validated against attacks with manipulated dns-information, like phishing,” Binero’s press release said.

It’s hard to find any worldwide numbers to compare to but ICANN reported yesterday that 88 TLDs (Top-Level Domains) are DNSSEC signed.

But what is DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) and why should you care whether your domains are signed with it or not?

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On December 2, 1991, Apple released the first version of QuickTime. Back then, QuickTime was at the forefront of bringing video to personal computers, and it has, without a doubt, had a tremendous impact on personal computing, multimedia, and the Internet since its introduction.

But in the twenty years since then a lot has happened, and the question is what is the relevance of QuickTime today in a web- and mobile-centric world?

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With an estimated 2 billion Internet users as of March 2011, about a third of the world’s population is online. That still leaves almost 5 billion people around the world that are not connected, a huge potential for the coming years.

But things are developing fast. For most of us, an Internet connection at home and at work is something we’ve had for perhaps 15 years by now.

To better understand how fast it has developed, we used data from the World Bank to visualize Internet adoption over the past 20 years. Read on to find out what it looks like.

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When visiting a website we usually expect it to have multiple pages.

But haven’t you also come across websites with just a single page? In other words, there’s just a homepage and nothing else to click on to.

Now it seems like the single-page website may be a dying breed. We looked at the numbers and here’s what we found.

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There can’t be much doubt that the mobile web is exploding in popularity. From the first mobile web access offered commercially with the Nokia 9000 Communicator phone in Finland in 1996, things have moved fast.

Today we’re seeing increased sales in smartphones and tablets, faster mobile data connections, apps, and more. Basically, we’re accessing Internet services more and more from something that is not a PC.

We’ve put together some numbers to attempt to show a picture of what the mobile web was like so far in 2011, how it is has developed, and perhaps take a peek into the future as well.

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Two web browsers currently use a rapid release schedule combined with automated updates. Chrome has had it from the start, and Firefox started using it this summer with the introduction of Firefox 5. Both Google and Mozilla release new versions every six weeks.

There are some differences between Chrome and Firefox as to how these automated updates work, but essentially the idea is that the browser should be updated to new versions automatically without bothering the user, and ensure that as many users as possible are running the very latest version. There are plenty of benefits to this approach.

However, we’ve noticed that this process seems less successful for Firefox than it is for Chrome. We pointed this out a while ago, noting that Firefox now leaves a good number of users behind with every new version.

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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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