Netcraft says it received responses from 155,230,051 websites, an increase of 5.4 million since last month. The Web has grown by nearly 50 million sites since December 2006, which breaks the record for growth of the Web in one year. The previous highest growth was 30 million websites in 2006. However, Netcraft says this figure remains far less than the 160 percent growth seen back in 2000.

While there continues to be strong expansion in the traditional hosting space, the most dramatic growth this year has been in websites through blogging service providers. MySpace, Live Spaces and Blogger now account for approximately 25 million sites in the survey and both Microsoft and Google are also attracting a large volume of users by integrating services like search, online collaboration, blogging and electronic mail.

There have also been nearly 19 million new active sites since last December, an alternative measure that excludes parked domains and other templated sites, for an annual growth of 38 percent.

Netcraft recently announced that DataPipe and Rackspace were the most reliable hosting company sites for October 2007, followed closely by Seeweb.