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Comment by fortawesome | Hacker News Reader

73 million sites comes from our friends at Meanpath (their search engine isn't running anymore, sadly). They showed us on 7.3% of websites. Best guess is there are about a billion sites on the internet. Thus, 73 million.

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Where did the 1000/visitors/site/day come from? This is what seems unlikely and improbable. This resource is being cached as well, so these numbers do seem obtuse.

Not sure on the 1000/visitors/site/day. But we're also on some pretty big sites as well. IIRC, the final number there is higher than what MaxCDN (BootstrapCDN folks) serves. Not by much though. Within an order of magnitude I think (which is pretty accurate for this kind of guesswork).

Of those 73 million, how many of them are serving the file themselves, vs pointing to it hosted by someone else? I know you can just point to google directly for their fonts, or unpkg.com for js packages. Is that something people also do for font awesome? Those shared links would greatly increase the cache level, and reduce the number of cache misses, and amount of data served.

According to Netcraft [0] there are currently 171,432,273 active websites. However there were 1,436,724,046 host names on the net. A total of 6,225,374 web-facing computers was reported.

Interestingly the number of active sites hasn't materially changed in 5 years, but host names have skyrocketed.

[0] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...

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