Tim Berners-Lee, fondly known as the father of the internet, gave birth to the world's first website, 25 years ago to the day. While working at CERN, Berners-Lee made the inaugural page of the World Wide Web live on 20 December, 1990. The page opens with a descriptor saying, "The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents." Although this wasn't much of a website, this page laid the ground for the internet of the future. 5 years ago, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the first website, CERN had made the page live with its original URL. You can still go and visit this page to get a sense of how basic the idea of a website was back then.
In September 2014, a milestone of 1 billion websites was reached as per the Web Server Survey by NetCraft. Although since then, the number of websites has declined and fallen below the 1 billion mark. Internet Live Stats predicts that the 1 billion milestone may now be resurrected by 2017. In other interesting statistics from Q3, 2015, Asia is now the largest base of internet users, followed by Europe at number two and Latin America at number 3. Although, when we look at internet penetration rates, Asia ranks at number 7, with a penetration rate of 40%, whereas North America is leading the rally, with a penetration rate of 87.9%.
Source for statistics: Internet World Stats