There are currently 1.88 billion websites, with 576,000 new sites being created every day, according to Internet Live Stats.

The United States has the most websites right now, with about 420,000 sites currently hosted. This number is quite surprising considering that the first website, created just 30 years ago, was not based in the United States. It was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in Switzerland, in Europe. He was actually a British physicist and the website he started was called WorldWideWeb (W3). The site was a manual of the web, describing its use and details. The url was also quite simple, as it was "http://info.cern.ch".

Within just one year, the world was graced with 10 different websites, and once the royalty status was lifted, users began creating even more websites. The growth continued until today there is a giant mesh of websites, accessible to everyone at their fingertips. According to WorldWideWeb, a website is a host name, a unique name, which can be used as a name server and as an IP address.

In 1994, Yahoo was created, being the 4th most popular search engine today. By the time the first and most popular engine was born, there were already about 2 million websites. Of the 1.7 billion websites currently hosted, only 200 million are active. The rest is either an experiment that is no longer in vogue or a failed venture. Technical problems, server issues, and late payments are also to blame for many websites that are currently dormant.

There is one thing that websites cannot function without, rather like a physical asset: domains. A domain is like a title or label of websites that makes them distinctive or serves as their identity card. Today there are 362.5 million registered domain names with over 1500 domain extensions. This number is increasing by 3.9% every year as more and more users register. There are different domains based on different niches. For example, .edu is for education, while .org is for non-profit organizations. Similarly, .gov is for government websites and .mil for those belonging to the military.

Websites are not as simple as one might think. Besides domains, there are two different types of websites. The first type is called "static sites". These are websites whose content is coded in html and are not capable of involving the user or being interactive. The second type is known as "dynamic websites". They have real-time databases and can be subject to change, such as e-commerce sites and blogs.

The most visited websites in 2021 in the U.S. are Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, with more than 100 billion hours of browsing per year. Globally, the most visited site is once again Google, followed by YouTube and Facebook.

Source : developpez.com