There are 662 million websites on the Internet.

According to data from the monitoring company Netcraft, as of May 1, 2012, there were 662,959,946 websites operating on the Internet.

This number was 14 million fewer than at the beginning of April. For the first time in almost two years, the number of websites on the internet has declined.

Experts attribute the decline in website activity to the removal of 28 million hostnames in the .info domain zone. In total, websites hosted on 100 domains and four IP addresses were removed.

The report also notes that the Nginx web server has been growing its database for the ninth month in a row. In April, this server increased its database by 894,000 hosts. As of early May, the server served 5.48% of all websites. This is double the previous month's figure.

Apache server lost 17.5 million hosts in the last month, but remains the market leader.

The authors of the Netcraft report note that for the first time in April, the company detected 339 servers supporting the experimental SPDY protocol. This protocol is designed to load websites faster.

This protocol is currently supported by browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and support for this protocol will be available to Nginx server users in the coming weeks.