Internet Growth in 2005 Sets Record

miller60 writes "Netcraft's Web Server Survey reports that a large gain in web sites in October makes 2005 the strongest year ever for Internet growth. The web has added 17.5 million sites so far this year, eclipsing the previous annual best of 16 million during the dot-com boom in 2000. And that's with two months left in the year. Is this growth for real? Web hosts targeting the small business market (like Yahoo Small Business and Go Daddy) report that business is booming, suggesting that web-wary local businesses are finally going online. But some of the the growth is likely due to domain name business models, with speculators buying large numbers of domain and placing advertising on them."

Comments

Re:what real value from this info?

[jzeejunk]

does a blog represent a single site? If so, would that mean a couple of Google machines hosting 10,000 blogs would represent 10,000 sites?

TFA says "Hostnames". I don't think a blog can be called a hostname.

Re:what real value from this info?

[gunpowda]

However, some criteria that would make it more clear to me what they're counting as web sites

An older survey of theirs seems to contain the answer:

The Netcraft Web Server Survey is a survey of Web Server software usage on Internet connected computers. We collect and collate as many hostnames providing an http service as we can find, and systematically poll each one with an HTTP request for the server name.

So yeah, they're probably being quite lax about actual content.

Re:But what happened to .info?

[miller60]

About a year ago the .info central registry, Afilias, began offering the domains free to registrars - who could then charge for them or give them away. A unit of eNom registered more than a million .info names "on behalf of" their existing .com and .net customers. Soon after Dotster followed suit with about 350,000 more. The one-year free registration period on these .info names is now expiring, and a bunch are being deleted as a result.

Only problem with that

[scronline]

Netcraft is inaccurate as all get out. When things fall off the list, they don't come back no matter what you do. When things get on the list, the don't necessarily fall off the list. Basically it's an unpredictable service that only caters to the largest of hosting companies and ignores all of the rest with extreme prejudice.

With that in mind, I place such small stock in ANYTHING that netcraft says. How can I do otherwise when sites that have been hosted by me for years never show up on netcraft, and sites that died 6 years ago are still showing up as hosted by me.