Web Host Marketing Roundup: MediaTemple Gains Most in Popularity
- By Isabel Wang on January 04, 2007
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FacebookSo I spent the last hour scoping out a bunch of your competitors for you. I looked up how they're doing on Alexa, Compete.com, Quantcast.com and the Commercial Intention Detection Engine on Microsoft adCenter Labs. I put all the stats on a Google Spreadsheet, which I've published here.
What did I learn from this exercise? The bad news is, the competitive research tools we've got are *wildly* inconsistent. Alexa says The Planet is the 153rd highest traffic site, but Quantcast and Compete.com put it at #26406 and #31035, respectively. The commercial intention rating of Aplus.Net visitors was 0.03 when I compiled this list the other day; now it's up to 0.68.
Still, when you look at the stats in aggregate, some fuzzy patterns do emerge. For instance, the most popular web hosting sites (with highest average Alexa/Compete/Quantcast rankings) seem to be:
* 1449: GoDaddy
* 3171: iPowerWeb
* 3975: Register.com
* 6266: Aplus.Net
* 6675: BlueHost
I was surprised that 1&1 wasn't higher up on the list (they're #9, with an average ranking of 9574), given its super prominent print ads.
Between Alexa's and Compete.com's growth stats, MediaTemple appears to be gaining fastest in popularity. Its position advanced by 6847 (or 159% of its current #4295 ranking) on Alexa, and 84678 on Compete. Other big winners include BlueHost, HostGator and DiscountASP.NET.
On the downside, the EV1Servers site seems to be losing ground; has some of its traffic gone to The Planet? iPowerWeb, Hostway and Dotster have declining rankings as well.
Most interestingly of all, I did a side-by-side comparison (on the "traffic quality" tab here) of Quantcast's visitor stickness metric (percent of audience that are "regulars" or "addicts", versus "passersbys"), Compete.com's average stay estimate (number of minutes spent per visitor), and Microsoft adCenter Labs' commercial intention rating.
And the winners in terms of visitor quality are 1&1 - as well as the same three sites with decreasing traffic rankings (iPowerWeb, Hostway and Dotster). Looks likes their marketing teams have succeeded in attracting a smaller quantity of more highly targeted traffic.
DiscountASP, on the other hand, gains on both fronts, as do Intermedia.NET and GoDaddy.
One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers. Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)
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Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
The Planet & EV1Servers have merged...
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
Yes - but they continue to maintain completely separate websites. I was interested to see how the traffic patterns have changed on each side after the merger. It seems The Planet has come out ahead.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
EV! server is merged?
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
8 months ago! If you go to their website, you'll see that they're now "ThePlanet-EV1Servers".
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
This traffic is so distorted because it includes all the traffic on all the servers that these hosts provide. this is not based on direct traffic to each perspective hosts website. This is why these numbers are sooooo wrong.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
Thank you very much for the information, Isabel. I agree there are some very interesting trends.
Thanks for including Liquid Web! Have a great new year.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
Don't know how iPowerWeb can stay high in the ranks. I've had nothing but issues with them and for the past 2 weeks haven't been able to FTP into a client's site. I'm now moving the client.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 05, 2007
Jah - I'm pretty sure the stats don't include all traffic on each web host's network. As a point of reference, Quantcast and Compete both show that GoDaddy gets fewer than 1 million visitors/month. Surely this can't be the case across its 12 million+ domains??
http://www.quantcast.com/godaddy.com
http://snapshot.compete.com/godaddy.com
Travis - Liquidweb is doing great! I'm sure the new data center is filling up already :)
Christine - these are only traffic figures; they are unrelated to the hosting providers' service quality.
Comment by Anonymous on Monday, January 08, 2007
Isabel- you make a valid point. I have friends who use Media Temple, and I hear only good things about them. I have used iPowerweb in the past and I too have only had problems, their service is cheap, I guess you get what you pay for. I know use Media Temple and while it is a little more money, the service and reliability is well worth it.
Jah
Comment by Anonymous on Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Taking your spreadsheet, removing the N/As, and opening it with AgileGraph generates the following graphs...
Bar Chart
http://www.agilegraph.com/images/Wang1.jpg
Scatter Plot
http://www.agilegraph.com/images/Wang2.jpg
...and highlights the inconsisteny you've discovered. Helpful?
-Jeff Carpenter
http://www.agilegraph.com
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, September 14, 2007
Think that the most popular web hosts may not represent the best web hosting solution at the same time.
Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, March 26, 2009
What does popularity have to do with quality? I don't care if only 10 people have heard of or use the site I'm using if it's hte fastest and most reliable!
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