According to England-based Netcraft, ten million new websites sprouted up in the 13 months between its last survey in 2003 and May of this year. That volume of growth, says Netcraft, far exceeds earlier growth periods during which it took the Internet 21 months to grow from 30 million sites to 40 million.
Netcraft conducted its first survey in August 1995 when only 18,957 sites existed. That number took a leap in 1997 when the number of web pages grew to one million. By February 2000, during the dot-com heyday, that number soared to ten million, and then hit 20 million by the end of that same year.
By July 2001, the Internet had reached 30 million websites. After that, says Netcraft, the web hit a lull that it is only now rebounding from and which can be attributed to the overall revival of the Internet economy, a boon in online advertising, increased consumer confidence, and online retail spending.
"The upward trend resumed in February 2003, when we detected 35.8 million sites; about the same number as the Dec. 2001 survey," the firm stated on its website.
However, according to Internet News, the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has come up with a radically higher website count through its research which allows Internet Protocol addresses to be counted as domain names.
ISC has been conducting surveys since the early 1980s at which time only 213 web hosts existed. But that number has recently been counted at a whopping 233,101,481.
The radical difference in numbers is reportedly the reflection of different research methods. According to ISC, Netcraft counts the number of domains through web servers.
Neither company was available for comment at press time.