Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

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:

Number of websites on the internet from 1990 to 2008
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:

Number of websites, Dec 90 to Jan 96
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.

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free