Netcraft has released their latest web surveys for the month of March with a surprising result - there are now over 60 million web sites that responded to HTTP requests from their services.

The milestone comes just nine months after the survey crossed the 50-million mark in May 2004, as the growth of the Web continues to accelerate, approaching the dizzying pace of the height of the Internet boom. During the year 2000, the number of sites found by the Netcraft survey doubled from 10 million to 20 million in just seven months. More recently, it took 13 months for the Web to grow from 40 million to 50 million sites.

Apache continued to take market share from Microsoft servers, gaining nearly 0.7 percent last month after gains the previous two months. After little or no change in server market share during 2004, Apache has widened its margin by 2.0 percent thus far in 2005.

It's no big surprise that Apache is still winning out - and not by a small amount either. The growth of the internet is still staggering to me, though. I know there's more and more people/services/companies/etc getting their presence on the web set up and ready to go, but that jump is just amazing in the nine months it took...