New surveys on data center providers

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 30 April 2020 in News, Alibaba, Beget, China Telecom, China Unicom, Data Centers, GoDaddy Group, Google, Hetzner, Locaweb, Microsoft, Newfold Digital Group, OVH, Sakura, Team.blue, United Internet, Wix, WP Engine, Xneelo

"Who is hosting a website" may sound like a quite straightforward question, but if you look closer, that question may be quite ambiguous. Often, there is a chain of providers. Let's look at an example.

Say, a shop commissions a web designer to build a website, and also to take care of the hosting for a monthly fee. The web designer does that for a couple of his customers, by renting a handful of servers from a local web hosting company. This hosting company, however, does not actually own the servers, but outsources the management of all the physical equipment to a large data center. Now, who is hosting this website? Whatever we say, the web designer, the local hosting company or the data center, all answers are correct in some way. What we try to do in our statistics, is to identify the entity closest to the customer as the hosting provider, and to identify the entity that runs the servers as data center. In our example, the web designer is theoretically the hosting provider. However, typically he would not show up in any public records of the website, so he is not detectable. Our analyzer would most likely identify the hosting company and the data center, and add these entities to our statistics.

Very often, the hosting provider and the data center provider are the same. W3Techs, for instance, runs on a few Hetzner servers. But as Hetzner operates its own data centers, they are also our data center provider. Actually, Hetzner also provides our DNS servers.

But there are many cases where the distinction is very significant. One example is WP Engine, the most popular WordPress hosting provider. WP Engine hosts 1.4% of all websites, more than Automattic. Yet, WP Engine is no data center provider, WP Engine sites run on Google data centers, and so do Wix sites, for example. Google is the data center provider of 6% of all websites, but hosting provider of only 3.2%.

The biggest data center providers are the GoDaddy Group just ahead of Amazon and Google. The top 6 data center providers combined, which further includes the Endurance Group, OVH and Hetzner, have more than 30% of the data center market.

Amazon is the clear leader among the top 1000 sites with 19.5% of that market segment, followed by Google, then the three Chinese providers China Telecom, Alibaba and China Unicom, and Microsoft ranking 6th in that valuable market.

There are also big regional differences. Amazon is most popular is USA, UK, Sweden, Norway, Australia and New Zealand. OVH is the regional champion in France, Spain and several African countries, United Internet in Germany and Poland, Alibaba in China, Sakura in Japan, Beget in Russia, team.blue in Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark, Xneelo in South Africa and Locaweb in Brazil.

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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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