New surveys on web hosting and reverse proxy services

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 28 December 2015 in News, Reverse Proxies, Web Hosting

The GoDaddy Group is the most popular web hosting provider, hosting 5.4% of the websites in our surveys. In that statistic, GoDaddy Group consists of GoDaddy and Media Temple, which is owned by GoDaddy.

Please note that we include in our surveys only the top 10 million websites according to Alexa, as we don't believe that counting the millions of parked domains or spam sites is any useful for our purpose. There are more restrictions for websites to be included, for example regarding subdomains and redirected domains. You can read more about our criteria on our technology overview and FAQ.

Following GoDaddy, the most popular hosting provider is the Endurance Group, which operates a large set of hosting brands such as Bluehost and HostGator.

Next you find OVH, a French provider, then Amazon, which is particularly strong among high-traffic sites, and Hetzner, a German provider completing the top 5.

There is a surprisingly high regional diversity in web hosting, higher than in any of our other categories. GoDaddy is very strong in North America and India, OVH is strong in France, Spain and in the African francophone countries. Hetzner dominates in Russia, in the Balkan countries and South Africa. Very strong domestic providers are also Sakura in Japan, Locaweb in Brazil, China Telecom in China, KT Group in Shouth Korea, Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan and Aruba in Italy.

The second new category in our surveys are reverse proxy services. A reverse proxy service is an intermediary for a website which handles request from web clients on behalf of the website's server. Common uses for reverse proxies are content delivery networks (CDNs, typically located in different geographical regions) and DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection services.

CloudFlare is the most popular CDN, used by 3.9% of all websites, followed by Akamai, Incapsula and Amazon CloudFront.

Collecting reliable hosting data is a challenging task. Some of the surveys one can find on the Internet take an embarrassingly naive approach, e.g. looking only at DNS entries, or carelessly combining hosting and proxy service information. We were putting a lot of effort into getting our results. We collect IP addresses for websites from locations in 4 continents. We partnered with ipinfo.io to obtain raw hosting information for IP addresses based on a variety of data sources. We did a lot of research for finding the brands and companies behind the raw hosting data. Finally, we combined that data with information we collect for other W3Techs survey categories, e.g. hosted blogging or e-commerce services.

Doing all of that still leaves plenty of room for different interpretation of the data at hand. Take for example the situation of a hosting provider that doesn't own any physical servers but uses one or more external data centers as infrastructure supplier. Are these sites then hosted by the company that runs the data centers or by the company that rents the servers on behalf of their clients? Or take the situation of an independent web designer, who also offers to take care of the hosting of the sites they are designing as part of a package. Is that a hosting provider? We decided such situations on a case by case basis, based on our evaluation of which part of such a service chain provides the core hosting tasks.

Hosting is a fast changing market. We will make trends visible by continuous monitoring these services and publishing them in our surveys and reports.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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