Honey, I shrunk the web

August 2009: 13.5 million fewer hostnames than previous month

In August 2009, according to Netcraft’s monthly web server survey, the internet shrank – there were around 13.5 million less hostnames than July 2009.

Netcraft, who conducted the server survey, suggested that much of the drop was due to the expiry of a large number of sites at The Planet, including 5 million sites in the .pl top-level domain all on one IP address, which were believed to be part of a linkfarm. [Wikipedia's definition of a linkfarm]

Following is a summary of the size of the internet, month by month to date in 2009, according to Netcraft’s survey.

January 2009
185,497,213 sites. A monthly loss of 1.23 million sites.

February 2009
215,675,903 sites. A monthly gain of more than 30 million sites.

March 2009
224,749,695 sites. A monthly gain of more than 9 million sites.

April 2009
231,510,169 sites. A monthly gain of more than 6 million sites

May 2009
235,890,526 sites. A monthly gain of more than 4.3 million sites.

June 2009
238,027,855 sites. A monthly gain of more than 2.1 million sites

July 2009
239,611,111 sites, A monthly gain of more than 1.5 million sites.

August 2009
225,950,957 sites. A monthly loss of 13.7 million sites.

Netcraft provide these great monthly surveys of the numbers of web servers on the internet. In my view, it is the closest we can come to understanding the size and growth of the internet.

Disclaimer: Netcraft is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers and ISPs on the internet. I have no association with them.