Chicago (IL) - The Internet continued its rapid growth rate in the final month of last year, adding more than five million websites for a bottom line of more than 150 million.

According to Netcraft's web server survey, web hosters saw an increase of 5.4 million websites during the month of December which resulted in a total of 155,230,051 websites by the end of the month. In 2007, the analysis firm estimates that the Internet has grown by more than 50 million websites, topping the previously recorded absolute growth record of about 30 million sites in 2006.

The dramatic increase in the number of websites should not come as a surprise, given the popularity of blogs, each of which counts as a website in Necraft's survey. MySpace, Live Spaces and Blogger now account for around 25 million sites in the survey. Active sites, which excludes parked domains and other templated sites has grown by 19 million sites within the past year, the company said.

After rather dramatic changes in the server software market over the past six months, growth for all web hosting services has turned into a calmer environment. Apache has lost once again market share, 1.19 percentage points to 49.57%, but Microsoft surrendered 0.08 points to 35.76% as well. The only winning platform among the five largest services is Google, which gained 0.23 points to 5.51%. Google is now listed as running 8.56 million sites, Microsoft software at 55.51 million and Apache at 76.95 million.