Internet on track to grow beyond 100 million websites this month

96,854,877 hostnames populated the Internet earlier this month, according to a survey released by Netcraft. The Internet grew by 4.2 million sites in August alone and gained 15.5 million since June of this year, the web analysis firm said.

The popularity of Google’s and Microsoft’s blogging service appear to be the main reasons for the explosive growth of the Internet. Netcraft said that Windows Live Spaces added 1.3 million hostnames over the past month and Google gained about 459,000. Compared to the first five months of this year, when the Internet added an average of 2.75 million new hostnames every month, the average has almost doubled to an average of 5.4 million since June.

The new scenario in web hosting also impacts web server market shares. Microsoft gained 1.13 percentage points to 31.26%, while Apache lost 0.88 points and ended up at 61.64%, according to Netcraft.