
Total number of Websites - dredmorbius
http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
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ericpauley
Is this including non-SOA domains? If so there's a huge potential for over
counting even if wildcards are ignored. For example, many isps and server
hosts will serve systematically generated domain records for individual server
instances and even home networks. (often these take the form of ip.ispname.net
or similar) even more troubling is that these could potentially resolve
correctly even if there is no actual website there. Without a more rigorous
method like looking at SOA I don't see this being useful as an absolute
metric.

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nikkwong
Wow, the original youtube homepage(1) is particularly terrible, even in
comparison to other websites from that era. Especially the "I'm a male seeking
everyone between 18 and 45" fields for the search box. Sounds like a dating
website. I suppose the founders were too busy working on the tech. :)

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/http://www.youtub...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/http://www.youtube.com/)

~~~
utopcell
As bad as this looks, I remember what an improvement it was over google and
yahoo video back then.

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dsamarin
It's definitely exponential. Would be great to see a chart for active websites
over the years. Knowing that 75% are parked domains shows more how much people
are buying domains only as a precaution.

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jstanley
Netcraft have been tracking active sites since around 2000.

Latest chart is on
[https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/09/24/september-2018...](https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/09/24/september-2018-web-
server-survey.html) (note log scale). They reckon ~180M active sites.

~~~
MrEldritch
Also worth noting: By their measure, the number of active sites has been
pretty much stagnant since early 2012.

I suspect that we're actually going to see that number start to _drop_ over
the next ten years, as old servers cease to be maintained and fall off the
Web.

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keyle
69% increase in 2017? ... What would not make this change dubious?

> It must be noted that around 75% of websites today are not active, but
> parked domains or similar

Ok, so who's buying domains hand over fist?

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MrEldritch
If you look at the number of hostnames as measured by
[https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/09/24/september-2018...](https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/09/24/september-2018-web-
server-survey.html) (switch to linear scale) it shows basically similar
trends. The 75% boost in websites is entirely due to parked domains.

As for why, I suspect it's caused by the flood of new TLDs.

