Have you ever wondered how big is the Internet?  I’ve put together a few figures from various sources to explain just how vast the Internet is.

Total Number of TLD Domains Registered Globally:

According to Verisign: 252 million as of Dec 31, 2012

Source:  http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/why-verisign/research-trends/domain-name-industry-brief/index.xhtml

Amount of Global Internet Traffic Per Month:

In 2011 traffic per month was recorded at 27,483,000 TB/month (27,483,000,000 GB/month) or at a speed of 137.42Terabits/second

Traffic is predicted by Cisco to grow as followed over the next 3 years:

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns827/networking_solutions_sub_solution.html

Number of Global Internet Users

Currently there are 2.40 billion global internet users, out of a total global population of 7.017 billion. That’s 34.27% of the global population has internet access.

Internet users broken down by global regions:

Total: 2.405 billion / 7.017 billion – 34.27% of the population
Africa: 0.167 billion / 1.073 billion – 15.56% of the population
Asia: 1.076 billion / 3.922 billion – 27.43% of the population
Europe: 0.519 billion / 0.821 billion – 63.22% of the population
Middle East: 0.090 billion / 0.224 billion – 40.18% of the population
North America 0.274 billion / 0.348 billion – 78.74% of the poulation
Latin America / Caribbean: 0.255 billion / 0.594 billion – 42.93% of the population
Oceania / Australia: 0.024 billion / 0.036 billion – 66.67% of the population

Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Number of Pages Indexed by Search Engines:

Google: 45 billion pages (average over last 3 months)

Bing: 12 billion pages (average over last 3 months)

Yahoo: 10 billion pages (average over last 3 months)

Source: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/

Number of Networks Globally:

With IPv4: 44,421

With IPv6: 7,240

A network is defined by having it’s own ASN (autonomous system number) and announcing publically routable IP addresses.

Source: http://bgp.he.net/report/netstats and verified with: http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/

How many Hosting Companies are there Globally?

At the time of writing there were 43,483 hosting companies globally, this was counted by finding out by finding all name servers running on the net.

Source: http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/globalstats/

Which Companies are Running the Most Servers:

This helps explain the number of servers actually running on the Internet by taking a look at the hosting companies, and other companies with the most servers:

Hosters:

OVH: 120,000 servers (April 2012)
Akamai: 105,000 servers (March 2012)
SoftLayer: 100,000 servers (December 2011)
Rackspace: 79,005 servers (Dec 30, 2011)
Intel: 75,000 (August 2011)
1&1 Internet: 70,000+ servers (February 2010)
Facebook: 60,000 servers (October 2009)
LeaseWeb: 36,000 servers (February 2011)
Intergenai (PlusServer/Server4You): 30,000 (2011)
SBC Communications: 29,193 servers
Verizon: 25,788 servers
Time Warner Cable: 24,817 servers
HostEurope: 24,000 servers
AT&T: 20,286 servers

Other companies with estimated over 50,000+ servers, that don’t publically report the number of servers they have (i.e. estimates):

Google: 900,000
Microsoft: 218,000
Amazon: 40,000+ (just EC2, many more)
eBay: Unknown
Yahoo: 100,000+
GoDaddy: Unknown

Source: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-got-the-most-web-servers/

All Top Level Domains are Available:

Currently there are 329 extensions available, however this is about to change to an unlimited number of extensions with the opening of applications for any gTLD (generic top level domains).

Source: http://bgp.he.net/report/dns#_alltlds

Top 5 Hosting Companies by Number of Domains Hosted:

domain-control.com (GoDaddy) – 72.6 million domains
name-services.com (Enom) – 15.7 million domains
worldnic.com (Network Solutions) – 6.4 million domains
1and1.com (1 and 1) – 5.8 million domains
1und1.de (1 and 1) – 5.4 million domains
rzone.de – 5.4 million domains

Source: http://bgp.he.net/report/tophosts

Do you have any other stats to show the size of the Internet?  Please post them!