Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

The rather petite Internet of 1995

As you may know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, sometimes we like to take a trip down memory lane. It’s time for another one of those trips, to the murky past of the Internet and the dawning World Wide Web of 1995.

Let’s start first with the people who actually use the Internet. How many were there back then?

Worldwide Internet users in 1995

Today there are almost 2 billion Internet users worldwide. In 2000, there were 361 million worldwide. But go back even farther in time and you’ll find out that back in 1995, the Internet had a worldwide user base of less than 40 million.

For perspective:

  • The Internet user base of today is 50 times larger than it was in 1995.
  • Facebook today is 15 times larger than the entire Internet was in 1995.

Top Internet countries, 1995 and now

The top five Internet countries in 1995 (in terms of Internet users) were:

  1. United States (25 million)
  2. Japan (2 million)
  3. Germany (1.5 million)
  4. Canada (1.2 million)
  5. United Kingdom (1.1 million)

Now the top countries are:

  1. China (420 million)
  2. United States (239 million)
  3. Japan (99 million)
  4. India (81 million)
  5. Brazil (76 million)

A wee bit of a difference, as you can see. Both in which countries are in the top, and of course the actual number of Internet users per country.

What about the number of websites?

Today there are 298 million websites on the Internet (as of March 2011, according to Netcraft). Back in June of 1995 there were 23,500 websites. For those of you counting, that means there are 12,681 times as many websites now as there were in 1995.

So, if we were to make a similar chart as the one for Internet users above, the 1995 part would be just a tiny fraction of a pixel.

A few other things from 1995

To help you orient yourself in time, here are some other things that happened in 1995.

  • Netscape introduced JavaScript.
  • Netscape Navigator completely dominated the web browser market.
  • Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 1.
  • Microsoft released Windows 95. Most people were using Win 3.1 or 3.11 at the time.
  • Sun announced Java.
  • Intel released their 133 MHz Pentium processor, and the Pentium Pro processor (running up to a mighty 200 MHz).
  • Sony launched the first Playstation.
  • Linus Torvalds released version 1.2.0 of the Linux kernel (a.k.a. Linux 95).
  • And sadly enough: The final original strip of Calvin & Hobbes was published.

 
Oh, and some guy called Bill Clinton had recently been elected president of the United States, but that didn’t quite fit in with the geek level of this post. 😉

Data sources: Wikipedia, Netcraft, Internet World Stats, The World Bank.

Photo credit: Steve Rhode.

Further reading for those of you who like stats: The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000.

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free