Being a partner and co-founder of a managed hosting company, Pleth Networks, I try to stay up with what’s going on in the industry. I stumbled onto Netcraft this morning and found this hosting research data pretty interesting. Notice how big a piece of the pie our datacenter, The Planet, has in comparison to the competition.
I wonder sometimes if our clients even realize that their websites reside in the exact same datacenter, with the same backbone and hardware components, as some of the busiest websites in the world? This is one area that my partners and I have never skimped on, I would put our network infrastructure and hosting products against any other company in the industry.
I was a little surprised that Google showed up on this list but I am assuming that it got most of it’s clout from some their internal online properties. Apparently this research covered one million of the most popular websites.
Netcraft has developed a dataset which shows the hosting locations of the million busiest websites, as determined by visits from users of the Netcraft Toolbar. The dataset gives a guide to the market share of companies hosting the sites responsible for the great majority of web traffic, and is uninfluenced by parked domains, personal sites, shared hosting accounts or the majority of blogs.
Although the top 1000 sites are concentrated amongst the web superpowers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and EBay, the hosting locations of the top million sites are widely fragmented, with a little over 3.25% sufficient for top spot.
The dataset is presented in an Excel spreadsheet and provides a variety of different filters and selections. Using the dataset, a hosting company can identify its relative position and closest competitors in each of the top 10,000, 100,000 and million tiers of site traffic, and also by region, country, and operating system. If this data is of value to you, you can check out: Netcraft to learn how you can purchase this data.
Questions or Comments?