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The Internet

2005 Looks Like Record Year for Net Growth 97

Posted by Zonk from the welcome-aboard dept.
miller60 writes "Netcraft reports that the Internet grew by 2.7 million sites in June, the second-largest gain in the history of its Web Server Survey. With growth of 10 million sites in the first half of the year, 2005 should easily surpass the existing annual growth record of 16 million sites from the dot-com boom year of 2000. The growth of small business web sites, blogs, domain name businesses and online advertising are all cited as factors in the strong gains."
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2005 Looks Like Record Year for Net Growth More

2005 Looks Like Record Year for Net Growth

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  • How many of these... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Silverlancer ( 786390 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @08:29PM (#12966285)
    The average site, of the 2.7m:

    eN14Rg3 y0Ur m4N1Lh0oD! or|)3r v!46Ra 70|)4Y!

    • If you build it... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A greater number say: This site under construction.
      • A website which is static over time is no fun and will not gain a wide audience. That is why all websites generally are in a state of permanent construction. Putting those stupid under construction pictures on sites is just tragic, they should be banned from the Internet immediately.
        • I think what the parent was referring to is domain names that are just sat on in case anyone wants to buy it.

          I recently went domain name hunting and found many good names I wanted to use, but they were all being used by blank pages. Pages that say "under construction" and that's it. And that's all that ever will be until someone buys them from the owner.
    • I wonder how they count a 'site'.
      If there are two hundred domain names of the form hot-sex-women-frankenfurter.com that all redirect to teenzexpozed.com, does that count as one, or two hundred?

  • Hmmph (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @08:30PM (#12966293) Journal
    Just the other day we were being told that the Internet was broken and needed replacing [slashdot.org]. Then, we find that it is growing [slashdot.org] very nicely, only to have this article confirm it...

    I mean, is this where I toot my own horn and say: I told you so!!?!? [slashdot.org]

    • Re:Hmmph (Score:3, Funny)

      by tktk ( 540564 )
      Being broken and being able to grow in size are not mutually exclusive situations.

      For example: AOL. Broken from birth, IMO.

    • Re:Hmmph (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Bluntly, ``growing'' does not mean ``not broken or in need of replacement.'' Cancer grows a lot, too, you know. Want to take a guess at how many of those sites are made by spammers and phishers?

    • That article doesn't say the internet is broken. It just says that is there the possibility of a new network design that would improve on the current structure of the internet. Who knows the new internet and the old one could co exist.
    • Just because the world wide web is growing faster than before, doesn't nessicarily mean that the Internet is healthy.

      I would still argue that, while yes, the web is growing and a lot of good is happening on the Internet, it is still fatally flawed as evident in email, search engine, and blog spam. Putting it simply, the Internet is flawed because there isn't a structure in place for it to pay for itself without annoying advertisements. Google's made a lot of headway in this department, but even they're get

  • Server trends & commercial blogs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @08:30PM (#12966299) Homepage Journal
    Its interesting that the percentage of Microsoft powered servers has risen 0.27 from the last statistics, perhaps suggesting that improvements to the latest versions of IIS are increasing use. As for the overall growth, the use of blogs as a commercial tool seems to really be coming into age and this may prove interesting as to filtering and blocking spam or excessively promotional blogs from search engines and feed spiders.

    • Re:Server trends & commercial blogs (Score:4, Informative)

      by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @08:37PM (#12966343) Journal
      Its interesting that the percentage of Microsoft powered servers has risen 0.27 from the last statistics, perhaps suggesting that improvements to the latest versions of IIS are increasing use.

      And the month before, their change was -0.28%. So what? You need to see an actual trend before you can possibly conclude anything.
    • Over here at http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200506/ index.html [securityspace.com], it shows Apache simply increased its market share in the month heading up to July 2005. This reminds me of what statistics can be: They can be made/manipulated into anything the presenter wants to project. So who is telling lies here? SecuritySpace or Netcraft or both?

      • The two survey different sets of sites, so it's not unexpected to see some differences between the two. It's just "noise" .. on the whole they should reveal the same trends. Both reveal a strong and continuing long-term growth of Apache [netcraft.com], and both reveal that IIS's share of the market has been more or less stagnant for some years now - seemingly stuck at around 25%, with a few ups and downs here and there, but not going anywhere - in fact declining very slightly.

        Because the total number of servers is growi

        • Microsoft has already tried this tactic with Windows Server 2003, Web Edition [microsoft.com]. It seems just lowering the pricetag isn't enough to get any meaningful amount of people to switch. The fact of the matter is, it's easier to deploy websites in bulk on Apache, especially a large number of sites sharing a single system (machine, cluster, or whatever). There's also things like authentication (IIS can only do authentication against a Windows username/password, Apache does it against a file by default and can be e
    • Oh No! Netcraft confirmed that BSD is dying!

  • Sites or hostnames? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01, 2005 @08:31PM (#12966303)
    It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.

    • Re:Sites or hostnames? (SPAMMERS) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @09:18PM (#12966531)
      It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.

      So true. Judging by all the throw-away domain names I see in spam everyday (e.g., fqydahwviagra.scam), I wonder what percentage of the domains are real. I also wonder if some of the domain name expansion is just companies protecting themselves with alternate tradename spellings and TLDs
      • I like the way you think.

        What we need is a new TLD, and have all the Spammers get their domains under it. It's easy to block, it's easy for parents to protect their kids from V!a-G-i-kra.

        (FYI: This was the same argument for .xxx)
        -M
        • It won't work. Adult sites and .xxx may work, since the vast majority of adult sites i've come across make huge efforts to keep themselves above board and easily filtered, so .xxx makes sense.

          But .spam? It would just get blocked at every level and there is no good reason for spammers to use it.
    • How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.

      Yes, but in the same respect, how hard is it to have multiple sites per domain name? Not very.

      They probably even out quite nicely, in fact it is quite possibly a lot higher than the figures given, with that in mind.
    • I also know of several people that have registered domains that they plan to eventually have sites on, or to get a name they want before it is taken. So you're right, this is probably a very inaccurate picture of actual growth. Not to mention are they subtracting sites that are no longer available. Kind of like calculating the population by adding birth records to the last census.

  • Link-farms? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Trepalium ( 109107 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @08:31PM (#12966306)
    How many of those sites are just link farms used to pollute search engines like Google? I'm noticing more and more of these linkfarms getting high placement when searching for things. It's making searching frustrating.
    • What is a link farm? is that one of those sites, no matter what obscure search term you put in, it's always the first site that comes up on google?

      Then you visit that site, and find out there is absolutely nothing related to what you are searching for, but just ads for shitty domain hosting, links to links to other links for shopping, etc?

      • What is a link farm? is that one of those sites, no matter what obscure search term you put in, it's always the first site that comes up on google?

        Then you visit that site, and find out there is absolutely nothing related to what you are searching for, but just ads for shitty domain hosting, links to links to other links for shopping, etc?

        You got it.
    • Well that's exactly it... Sure there's been an increase in net growth, but it hasn't been at all positive, except for the few that play google to make some quick profit.

      I've always been a strong believer in the strength of google but recently the last few times I've done some deep querying, all I'm presented with is garbage sites. When you look deep into google, all you see is a rising filth of exploitive money making webpages. Google has to get a handle on the situation soon or their relevance as the ki
  • The porn industry has grown by 2.5 million websites in the past year...

  • Personally, I perfer quality to quantity! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by busman ( 136696 ) * on Friday July 01, 2005 @08:34PM (#12966321)
    Anyone seen a good new site in '05?

  • With China's rapid pace of catching up, I'm guessing that the proportion to new sites in China as opposed to other countries is significantly higher.

  • This leads me to wonder: Is Linux/BSD part of the reason for the continuing rapid growth of the Internet?

    The cost of alternatives like Windows Server is incredibly expensive, at least for smaller companies and individuals.

    With the free availability of commercial strength operating systems like Linux and BSD, almost any small company or individual can have a solid presence on the Internet. Not to mention, web hosting providers can keep costs way down by using Linux/BSD.

    This is truly an exciting time to li

    • I just realized that it was almost criminal for me not to mention other free software which makes the Internet possible for a wider range of people:

      Thanks are also due to Apache, Tomcat, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, the list goes on...

      • Never heard of GNU? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        There is one glaring omission in your list: the GNU project. In fact, the net should really be called GNU/Internet.
  • ...how many of those are geocities?

  • The rise of the blogs (Score:5, Funny)

    by supercytro ( 527265 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @09:16PM (#12966520)
    The growth of *snip* blogs *snip* are all cited as factors in the strong gains.

    I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out "Look what I had for breakfast this morning"

  • How many of these sites are sites like slashdot.net, whom use domains for useless purposes to sell advertising and wait for someone to pay a large sum of money just to have the domain used for a useful purpose. There should be a top level domain that does not allow registering of sites that provide little purpose.
  • It's pretty steady on the first graph; about a 2.1:1 ratio of hostnames to "active" (sites, servers?). I suspect this goes beyond simply registering foo.org and foo.com while only running foo.com. Any suggestions?

  • quality web sites?? where are they???? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by John Seminal ( 698722 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @09:31PM (#12966584) Journal
    reports that the Internet grew by 2.7 million sites in June, the second-largest gain in the history of its Web Server Survey

    I think the best days of the web are behind us.

    When the internet first hit, almost all websites were free. If Joe wanted to tell the world about his love of aviation, he set up a website. People put in lots of hours, with quality information.

    But how has the internet evolved?

    Money currupted the internet.

    For example, try typing in "learn spanish" in google. How many websites are places that want your money? When the internet first started, there were better websites that were free. Not anymore, they got pushed off the web.

    I think the web has outlived its usefullness. It is like TV. Too many commercials. I wonder if the next computer will come with a machine to suck in dollar bills. Maybe it can transmit the numbers off a $10 bill and shred it, so that way the bank credits the other end.

    • When the internet first hit, almost all websites were free. If Joe wanted to tell the world about his love of aviation, he set up a website. People put in lots of hours, with quality information.

      I know this may be hard to believe, but the Internet != the web. Before Mosaic came around people used talk, wais, ftp, etc. The Internet was operational 25+ years before the Web grew on it.

      Or I can just point to IM. They're not the web, but they use the Internet.

      But you do have a valid point about comme

    • Wikipedia etc. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dustmite ( 667870 )

      Nowadays, Joe Aviation-lover probably contributes to aviation articles on Wikipedia.

      "When the Internet first hit", people created lots of disparate Web sites all over the place, with little bits of information spread all over. It was hard finding and piecing together all this information if you needed to know more about something, because there would be a hundred different websites on a topic, by a hundred different people, all thin on info. Wikipedia was a stroke of genius - they got those hundred people

    • I rememeber the days when lycos was the search site. Then it started returning garbage with the first big wave of net commercialization (damn you, Bob Davis!).

      Then I found this little search site with an odd name just a demo on a stanford.edu webserver when I first found it, that returned much more relevant results.

      But then yahoo search results started getting overwhelmed with garbage, and I turned to another little project out of stanford. And that one has a good run, staying ahead of the garbage pretty
    • Get real, will you. Money is always there, and like every tool, it can be either used for good or bad. No offense, but sounds like you dont know how to use searchengines. One of the first lessons my daddy taught me was "you dont get something for nothing". My aphrosem, if it's free, it's probably a con.
    • Maybe you should refrain yourself from practicing a brain-dead approach to searching, such as "I will search only Google". Maybe if you typed your query on dmoz.org, you would have gotten www.learn-spanish-online.de as the second hit. Maybe if you tried something else than Google, you would see the world in a whole new light...

  • How does Netcraft define "site"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by securitas ( 411694 ) on Friday July 01, 2005 @09:46PM (#12966657) Homepage Journal


    How does Netcraft define the word "site"? If it just means domains that resolve to a host, it's not very encouraging. I would like to see a breakdown of the numbers that shows how many of these sites are linkspam farms, redirects and other such junk.

    My suspicion is that most of the growth comes from from such "sites". The survey notes read:

    • Speculation in the market for domain names, buoyed by rising resale prices and the ability to generate revenue via pay-per-click advertising on parked domains.
    • Strong sales of online advertising, especially keyword-based contextual ads that support business models for both domain parking and commercial weblogs.

    While individuals may use ad revenues to subsidize the cost of parking domains while they develop them, the new business model for advertising-filled parked domains and spam-filled "commercial weblogs" means that the amount of junk on the net will increase.

    This also means that it's now even more lucrative for domain squatters to hold onto decent domains, which will increase their resources and abilities to register and squat on an even greater number of domains. After all, this is now an acceptable and viable business model that works against those who want to contribute something useful to the Internet. Squatters can now cite ad-revenue squats in arbitration cases.

    This isn't a positive development.

    • I register a domain. 1 half an hour goes by. Netcraft asks for index.html on port 80 at what ever IP the domain points to. Volla, new site. Fact is that the Netcraft and MSN bots are extremely eager to frequently spider new domains. This becomes clear if you look at the logs for new sites: They are both on the top of the user-agent lists.
  • Google only lets you see the first 1000 URLs matching your query, and many of them are irrelevent, useless, or charging a fee. It is sometimes hard to find reliable, relevent information.
  • Maybe thats why we're starting to get flooded with domains like .tv, .info, .biz, .lollercoaster, etc

    Problem with IPv4 was running out of IPs, but they must be running out of domain names too?

    Also, something should be done about the damn placeholder sites waiting to be bought, with no other purpose. You should not be allowed to have a domain name unless you're going have a REAL SITE there. A good example is the damn "search engines" which you get on as soon as you make a typo in a URL. Another example is
    • I can relate completely to this point. Last month I wanted to register vaandering.com - so I waited, patiently until the domain expired. Then there's the extra 15 days or so where the original owner can get last dibs on the domain before it gets tossed back into the pile. Well I went on holidays and came back to seeing my domain REGISTERED again! Imagine my surprise when I see it registered [whois.sc] to BuyDomains [buydomains.com]! A well-known domain squatting business. Now this is my legal name, whether or not they want to dis
  • The economic growth is what matters, and before the end of this year the whole damn thing going to collapse no matter how you look at it. For a technical community, there is almost a arrogance on slashdot that shuns economic science, and I think that people will pay a bitter price within the next year if they don't loose that attitude.

    • Economy collapse?! The real estate industry is single handedly holding the economy too high. High-tech is exactly where it should be, go blame the real estate industry.

      Between the interest rates not rising fast enough, and the Feds babying real estate as the only thing left. The average joe has to work their ass off in a low salary economy to feed real estate agents and rentlords. Don't blame slashdotters. At least techies have skills. Real estate agents just bullshit for a living.

      • Economy collapse?! The real estate industry is single handedly holding the economy too high. High-tech is exactly where it should be, go blame the real estate industry.

        That's what I am trying to say though. Druing the dot com boom, even though it was over inflated they still created a lot of technology and internet infrastructure that over the long term could promote enough growth to keep the economy from collapsing. This time, all the money is from real-estate, it creates little new technologies, no

    • there is almost a arrogance on slashdot that shuns economic science

      Contrary to what economists want to have you believe, economy is not an exact science. It's more akin to psychology in that respect. Many models, all contradictory, most of them wrong. 9 of of 10 predictions by so-called "expert economists" never materialize.

      As an example from the late 1990s, for every economist predicting the collapse of the internet bubble, you could find ten who were predicting it to go on for at least a decade.

      The e
  • That is what I would like to know: How many new people (w/valid credit card) get connected to the Internet every day? It is nice with Netcraft information on how much the competition is increasing every day, but what would be more fun to know is how many New Pepole get on the net daily? Does anyone know?
  • With sites like rotten.com do you refer to the web growing as "Net" growth or "Gross" growth?
  • Why do they continue to plot the NCSA server share when it flatlined 5 years ago?
  • Any entity (person, corporation, or partnership) should be able to get one domain name cheaply. After that, ICANN should impose a charge of about $250 per year, to kill off those "link farm" operations.

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