Web Growth Summary

Wanderer Results

The web has grown very fast. In fact, the web has grown substantially faster than the Internet at large, as measured by number of hosts. See the Internet Growth Summary for more information.

The rate of the web's growth has been and continues to be exponential, but is slowing in it's rate of growth. For the second half of 1993, the Web had a doubling period of under 3 months, and even today the doubling period is still under 6 months.

Results Summary
Month # of Web sites % .com sites Hosts* per Web server
6/93 130 1.513,000 (3,846)
12/93 623 4.63,475 (963)
6/94 2,738 13.51,095 (255)
12/94 10,022 18.3451 (99)
6/95 23,500 31.3270 (46)
1/96 100,000 50.094 (17)
6/96 230,000 (est) 68.041
1/97 650,000 (est) 62.6NA
* Host in the final column is defined as a listed hostname. The number in parentheses is using the number of hosts responding to ping. See the Internet Growth Summary for more details.

Backbone Results

The NSFNET, which was the primary backbone for the Internet before 1995, makes available statistics about what data is sent over the backbone. Since the NSFNET stopped running the backbone in April of 1995, new data is not available, but the early growth is clearly visible. The complete statistics are available from Merit.
NSFNET Backbone Usage Breakdown
Date% ftp% telnet % netnews% irc% gopher% email% web
6/9342.95.69.31.11.66.40.5
12/9340.95.39.71.33.06.02.2
6/9435.24.810.91.33.76.46.1
12/9431.73.910.91.43.65.616.0
3/9524.22.98.31.32.54.923.9

This presentations is copyright 1996, Matthew Gray
Reproduction rights are specified at the top level page.
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