The latest semi-annual survey of internet hosts from Network Wizards, which is generally seen as the most trusted and useful way of tracking the growth of the internet – which is different from determining how many people use it, which is technically impossible – has shown that the growth rate of the internet is actually accelerating. The Menlo Park internet software and service provider has been conducting surveys twice a year since 1987. The company’s founder Mark Lottor counts hosts by finding the domain name of every IP address that has thus far allocated. A host on the net is a computer that has an IP address. However, as the company points out, the survey does not necessarily throw up the number of physical machines attached to the net, as a single box can act like multiple machines and have multiple domain names and IP addresses. Anyway, this time round, the survey, conducted in July, counted 36.7 million hosts, up from 29.7 million in January’s survey. That’s a near-24% rise over the six months, compared to a 14% rise from July 1997 to January 1998, so it would suggest that the net’s growth rate is actually accelerating. In addition to counting hosts, Lottor and his team also do a ping operation on one percent of all the hosts found and then extrapolate that in an attempt to find how many of those are real and turned on. This time that found 6.5 million hosts, but it should be remembered that if pinged, say, outside office hours when they may be turned off, the machines will not respond to a request. Another point to remember is that although IP addresses may have been allocated to ISPs or corporations – they get allocated blocks, for example, ComputerWire gets a block of 256 to use – not all of them will have been used yet.
