Whilst you’re busy building websites, have you ever wondered how big the Internet is? How many websites, domains and how many pages? The reality is that it’s quite difficult to measure, so all figures are an estimate.

What’s for certain is that it’s growing – if you look at domain sales alone, the number of Top Level Domains went up by 16% in 2008 to 177,000,000.

One of the best assessments come from a company called Netcraft, who produce (amongst lots of other interesting research) a monthly ‘Web Server Survey’.

Each month Netcraft send out ‘requests’ to every website and server on the Internet, asking for a small bit of information to be returned to them.

In February they had responses from a 215,675,903 websites. ‘Woah, that’s a lot of Internet then’ you might say! True, but what’s really amazing is how many more sites that is from the previous month. There were more than 30 million more than January, a growth of more than 16%.

Lots of this growth can be pinpointed to China, thanks to a service called ‘Qzone’. This is the Chinese equivalent of MSN Messenger. Qzone have added a blogging service to their messenger client, and the 20 million sites that they serve mean that they are now the biggest single provider of blog sites, eclipsing Blogger and Windows Live spaces.

Here’s a graph showing the growth of active websites from August 1995 to February 2009, from Netcraft.

So is the Internet growing? Too right!