At the beginning of the year, there were 582.7 million websites operating on the Internet.

According to research company Netcraft, there were 582.7 million websites online as of January 1, 2012. This is 27.2 million, or 4.9%, more than the previous month. As a reminder, at the beginning of December 2011,there were 555 million websites.

The report's authors noted that all major web server vendors increased their market share in December. The Apache web server saw the largest increase in share, with over 16 million new sites added in the month. However, Apache's relative market share compared to other web servers declined by 0.3%. Microsoft's web server product increased its base by only 1.8 million, and its relative market share also declined.

At the same time, the Nginx web server increased its market share to 9.63%, which became an absolute record for it throughout its existence.