Bursting at the seams – ‘Net hits 100 million sites

Netcraft released its Web Server Survey for November 2006 today and we have passed the 100 million web sites mark. Some interesting notes from their release:

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft.

So what's really interesting is when I began commercial web design/development, Netcraft says there were already 10,000 web sites online. Seems pretty accurate. Some really cool stats include:

• April 1997 (1 million sites)
• February 2000 (10 million)
• September 2000 (20 million)

Apache still dominates the web server market holding over 60% market share.

The survey is well worth the read if only to imagine what the web was like when you began, even if that was just yesterday.