So how big is the World Wide Web? Netcraft says that the total number of websites on the Internet have now exceeded 182 million. This count was around 156 million early this year but growth of the web has almost doubled in the past two years.

What’s interesting is that out of these 182 million sites, nearly 10.5 million sites are hosted on Google’s own web servers* like Blogger, Google App Engine, etc. So that’s nearly 6% of the total websites.

Now Domain Tools also tracks all the different web domain names registered on the Internet and their count puts the total number of active domains as 106 million.

This is different from the Netcraft survey as Domain Tools won’t count the sub-domains since they are all registered to the same owner (like Google’s blogspot) but may technically be a different website and hence adds to the Netcraft count.

Related: Buying a Web Domain?

*Google’s web servers are often represented in HTTP responses as GFE (Google Front End) or GWS (Google Web Server) but we don’t know much about them except that the servers probably run on Linux and are modified versions of Apache.