What was the internet like in 2001?

Wikipedia launches in January, and nobody expects it to work. A typical home connection was 128 kbps, there were about 29,254,370 hostnames responding on the web, and a gigabyte of storage cost $5.

How long did it take to download a film in 2001?

A 4 GB film at 128 kbps would have taken about 3.0 days, assuming the connection held its rated speed the whole way, which it would not have.

How many websites were there in 2001?

About 29,254,370 hostnames responded to HTTP. That counts hostnames rather than distinct sites, which is why the figure occasionally falls between years without the web shrinking.

The internet in 2001

Wikipedia launches in January, and nobody expects it to work.

29,254,370 hostnames · Broadband arriving properly. 128 kbps ISDN, 512 kbps DSL, and 56k for most people still.

Wikipedia was a side project attached to a failing expert-written encyclopaedia called Nupedia, and the near-universal expectation was that letting anyone edit would produce garbage. The iPod arrived with five gigabytes of storage — a thousand songs — at a moment when a gigabyte of hard disk cost about five dollars, which is the entire reason it was possible at that price. Napster's shutdown scattered its users into a dozen less centralised successors, which is the pattern every subsequent enforcement action has followed.

The numbers

Websites: 29,254,370 hostnames responding to HTTP
Typical connection: 128 kbps — Broadband arriving properly. 128 kbps ISDN, 512 kbps DSL, and 56k for most people still.
A gigabyte of storage cost: $5, in 2001 dollars

How long things took to download

Assuming the connection ran at its rated speed throughout, which it did not. Real dial-up throughput after protocol overhead was typically 10 to 20 per cent below the modem's rating.
What	At 128 kbps
A 3 MB song	3 minutes
A 5 MB photo	5 minutes
A 700 MB CD image	12 hours 27 minutes
A 4 GB film	3.0 days
A 50 GB game	38 days

What arrived in 2001

Wikipedia, on 15 January
The iPod, in October
Windows XP

And what ended

Napster, shut down by court order in July

Against the years around it

Year	Hostnames	Typical speed	$/GB of storage	A 4 GB film took
2000	17,087,182	56 kbps	$10	6.9 days
2001	29,254,370	128 kbps	$5	3.0 days
2003	40,912,332	1.5 Mbps	$1	6 hours 13 minutes

Between 2001 and 2020 the typical connection went from 128 kbps to 100 Mbps, a factor of 781, and a gigabyte of storage fell from $5 to $0.020 — a factor of 250. The 4 GB film that took 3.0 days takes 6 minutes.

Common questions

What was the internet like in 2001?: Wikipedia launches in January, and nobody expects it to work. A typical home connection was 128 kbps, there were about 29,254,370 hostnames responding on the web, and a gigabyte of storage cost $5.
How long did it take to download a film in 2001?: A 4 GB film at 128 kbps would have taken about 3.0 days, assuming the connection held its rated speed the whole way, which it would not have.
How many websites were there in 2001?: About 29,254,370 hostnames responded to HTTP. That counts hostnames rather than distinct sites, which is why the figure occasionally falls between years without the web shrinking.

The internet in 2000 The dot-com bubble bursts in March and takes most of it with it.
The internet in 2003 MySpace, Skype, iTunes and WordPress all launch, and the social web starts.
Every year side by side Speed, storage cost and site count in one table
Convert data units Bits, bytes, and why a megabit is not a megabyte

Sources

Web Server Survey — Netcraft
ICT Facts and Figures / World Telecommunication Indicators — International Telecommunication Union
Historical cost of computer memory and storage — Compiled from contemporaneous retail advertising and manufacturer price lists

How these figures are compiled and checked