Planning for Another 100 Million Web Sites | Hacker News Reader

Planning for Another 100 Million Web Sites

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68 pointsdrusenko22 comments

“There are maybe 100 million Web sites out there – that is not many, when you consider that there are billions of people,”

considering that the vast majority of people just need a listing on an existing network, that's a completely pointless statistic. Yeah, 100 million websites. Ok. There's ten times as many Facebook profiles. Where do you draw the line? Oh, all the Facebook profiles look the same so that doesn't count. What about MySpace profiles? Does that delineate things? What about hostnames? Does that delineate things? What about all the hosts that are just Tumblr sites?

That 100M statistic is useless without a definition for how it's arrived at.

Particularly if we end up with Facebook, LinkedIn, and similar services continuing to grow and provide facilities for more and more types and volumes of institutions, in which case it may well be a lot more than just profiles on third-party sites that are ignored by things like this. We might gain ten sites that add 10% to the actual size of the non-porn Internet... in which case this would be even less meaningful.

Does anyone know where the 100MM number comes from?

According to Netcraft [1], there were over 600MM active sites [2] last month.

[1] http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/04/02/april-2013-web-...

[2] http://www.netcraft.com/active-sites/

The 600MM number is hostnames, the active site number is 186MM. At the end of the day, we don't really feel like hostnames (non-active, parked) are relevant.

I see, that makes perfect sense. Looks like I was reading things backwards this morning. Thanks David!

Fffff Ffxf . .r

My pocket must have written this. Sorry!

$5 billion/year is spent on parked hostnames. Wow.

How many of the 15MM+ weebly sites are active? It seems a stretch that 15% of all web sites are created with Weebly?

And how many "active" sites are just spam? When the archiveteam tried to backup posterous, it felt like the majority of all pages were spam.

There is a ton of spam on Weebly. We have a crowdsourced online shopping directory and 90% of the spam comments we get seem to involve Weebly sites. It's gotten to the point where we'll probably just write a simple spam filter that screens for "weebly" in our submissions.

Hey, we'd love to work with you on this. We have a full-time dedicated team that works hard on this and we have a zero-tolerance policy.

We work very hard to keep and maintain a high-quality network, and while the percentage spam is low across the network, even a low percentage can still be high volume for some.

Please email me (david+c@weebly.com) and I'll put you in touch with them, we are committed to taking a hard stance on spam.

Just emailed you an example.

Here is a more interesting question:

What proportion of all websites are created by engineers, versus by normal folk?

Its pretty clear that in the long run, the vast majority will be by regular folk using tools like Weebly. Theres just Billions more of them.

Maybe the tipping point has already come and gone.

I have 150 million webservers alone in Shodan (i.e. 150 million IPs with a webserver - completely ignoring vhosts), so 100 million seems rather low. Many of them are embedded servers etc., but there's a lot of web content out there.

I browsed a bunch of random weebly-made sites. They seem fairly nicely designed.. but this jumped out:

For many of the themes used: rather than showing photos the way that has been done since like 1994, with an <img> tag pointing to a jpeg image that is being downloaded and progressively decoded and painted.. there's some javascript that displays a loading spinner until the image has been fully downloaded.. then it shows the image.

It's quite annoying. The spinner attracts your attention in a bad way.

Visible e.g. here, on some of their showcase sites:

http://www.chairigami.com/

http://www.theorganicgallery.com/

Actually, that's a slideshow, which is a feature we offer. It uses javascript. Regular images are just good 'ol <img> tags :)

I'm glad to see that there are good places for the mum & pop shops to get websites without having to go through working with a wed dev agency. When I worked for one I know it would have been better for both sides if there were tools like this so that they could just make something as small as they needed whilst I could get on with larger projects.

"without having to go through working with a wed dev agency"

Depends on what you consider a website of course. Do you remember the "download Netscape Now!" days?

http://sillydog.org/netscape/banner.html

I agree. It's kind of ironic that after all these efforts at making web development easier, it's still difficult for a non-technical person to figure out how to get a simple store online. The learning curve associated with products like Wordpress, Magento, et al is quite high, even for a web dev like myself. Tools like these are very much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I work with http://www.squarespace.com, a competitor for most of the products above.

Interesting redesign. There aren't many non-application sites that have a fixed sidebar for its landing page. This feels a lot more professional now, akin to squarespace.com, however I wonder if that will hurt you. The last design felt more friendly and casual to cater to "mom & pop", which I imagine is a very profitable niche.

"HTML5 is supposed to solve the problem of writing for different devices and browsers, but designers have found that the standard has its own complexities"

WTF?!!!

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