20 percent of all servers bought by just four companies

Type in a URL and you're whisked off to a website that just works. Aside from the occasional online hiccup, most users don't think about what goes on behind the scenes to bring their favorite websites to them, but if you look a bit deeper, you'll find the amount of computing power it takes to run some of the world's biggest tech companies is almost unfathomable.

Now one Microsoft researcher has put some specifics to it, claiming that a full 20 percent of the world's server equipment is bought and used by only four companies: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.

With about 8 million servers being sold each year, that's 1.6 million computers bought and installed collectively by the above four companies -- yearly.

To put that in perspective, if the companies above are splitting the 1.6 million servers equally, that means they're each buying and installing over 1,000 servers a day, including weekends and holidays. Running 24/7 without a break, that's 45 servers added to each company's network every hour.

Those are phenomenal numbers, but it's really just the beginning of where the Internet is about to go. The prime mover through 2015? "Cloud computing," widely hailed as the Next Big Thing (though not a thing without some serious problems to overcome). For the uninitiated, the shift of computing power from end users to web-accessible Internet destinations means that the above companies -- and the rest of the tech world -- will likely have to increase the pace of server consumption and installation over the next few years even further.

I, for one, welcome our new server overlords!