How big is the internet worldwide and specifically in Belgium?

My apologies for the late reply, but the counting took a while. 😉

This is a very good question, but it is also very difficult to answer.

After all, how do you measure the size of the internet?

– The number of computers connected to it?

– The number of websites?

– The amount of available data?

And for every choice you make here, it is still very difficult to count as the numbers change drastically every day, but also because the internet is a so-called decentralized network. More specifically, there is no central system that keeps track of who or what is connected to the network, or keeps track of which websites are there, or which data is currently available.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways that give us an idea of ​​the size of the internet, such as:

– The last measurements of the Internet Systems Consortium (www.isc.org) at the beginning of 2008 counted more than 500 million ‘hosts’, ie computers that you can reach via a (domain) name on the internet (such as www. .ikhebeenquest.be).
Note that the number of domain names is much larger.

– The number of domain names with the most popular suffixes .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us is almost 100 million today (www.whois.net) and the number of Belgian domain names, with suffix .be, is slightly more today than 800000 (www.dns.be).

– A rough estimate of the number of available web pages is currently over 27 billion pages according to www.worldwidewebsize.com!