According to the latest numbers from Net trackers Pingdom, there are more than 162 million Web sites publishing on the Internet today.

We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 Web sites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 Web sites. Life was easy back then, Google was little more than an itch, and no-one had thought about putting the ‘e’ into business.

So how has the number of Web sites grown over time? Here is a snapshot of how we got from 1 to 162 million Web sites:

Date / Number of Web sites

Dec 1990 / 1
Dec 1991 / 10
Dec 1992 / 50
Jun 1993 / 130
Sep 1993 / 204
Oct 1993 / 228
Dec 1993 / 623
Jun 1994 / 2738
Dec 1994 / 10,022
Jun 1995 / 23,500
Jan 1996 / 100,000

Wonder about that one, single Web site back in December of 1990? That was http://info.cern.ch/, the first-ever Web site and Web server, created by the master of the universes himself, Tim Berners-Lee.

It’s amazing how the Web has gone from consisting of just this first little Web page to the huge network of millions and millions of Web sites that it is today (and that’s not even counting Weblogs), and how pervasive the Web has become in our society. We do our banking online, read our news online, have our encyclopaedias online, meet friends online. And all this has happened since 1990. How did people work back then?

For all you doubters out there, it’s worth pointing out that the definition of what counts as a Web site varies, but the numbers here are hostnames connected to sites that respond. The numbers from August 1995 and onward include parked pages as well, so it is larger than the number of ‘active’ Web sites.

Here’s to a 162 million more ...