Updated 1st March 2012 with latest figures
It is impossible to be absolutely certain how many websites there are in the world but UK research company Netcraft have released their latest February survey of web servers and concluded there are about 612 million websites in the world today – a rise of 30 million (5.2%) since last month.
Interestingly, the number of active sites is only 185 million – so there are 427 million inactive sites. That suggests that two thirds of all the websites in the world are not actually being used – but why not?
We think it is because many of these will be domain names bought to cover every possible eventuality e.g. a large company like Apple might buy the Apple .info and .net and .org domain names to prevent cyber-squatters misusing them to profit from the goodwill of the Apple trademark.
Others could be speculative domain names registered by individuals e.g. you might register your-own-name.com just in case you ever get famous 
And the rest are likely to be domain names that have been pre-registered in bulk by domain companies to sell off later.
As shown in the graph below, it’s astonishing that just over 5 years ago (Dec 2006) the total number of sites (hostnames) was only 105 million – just 17% of the current total. The rise of the internet is further shown by the fact that the total number of new sites added in the whole of 2006 was just 31m – nowadays that rate of increase is achieved in a single month!
In fact the total number of sites has more than doubled in the last 12 months alone. No wonder that it’s almost impossible to find a good website name still available if you want to create a new online presence – so if you fancy having your own personal domain name (and email address – because having email sent to your own name is quite cool!) now might be the time to buy one!
The full report is here and it is updated each month.
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525 million? thats crazy thats half a billion no? With an alex rank of under 500k, we feel great no? haha
wow, but 30 million increase per month must be unsustainable – shows why it is almost impossible to find a decent new website name though!
Wow…it’s a good thing that I bought mine when I did. Can you imagine what the numbers will be like in 20…30 years?? Crazy.
wawawee, thats a lot
I’d be interested to see the breakdown of these websites, specifically the active website by vertical. For example of the 185 million active sites 90 million are retail related and 25 million are finance related. Any clue on this?
Hi Daniel, I haven’t seen such figures and doubt they can be calculated over all active sites due to methodology used. At best it would need extrapolation from a smaller sample but then the question is which sample and how big…
e.g. the top 100 or 1000 websites will not be representative of the whole – a more random sample would be needed but, considering there are nearly 200 million, it would need to be a huge sample to draw any sort of accurate scaling up of the figures