Pingdom Blog Tracks Largest Hosting Company

• By Liam Eagle on August 12, 2008

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Pingdom, a provider of uptime monitoring, put another hosting-related post up on its usually-pretty-interesting blog "Royal Pingdom" last week in which it used data from a couple of sources to try to identify the "largest hosting company," as well as point out which ones are growing the fastest and might end up vying for that crown in the near future.

"When we talk about the size of a hosting company we mean the number of real websites hosted by that company."

So says the blog. At issue here is the fact that certain standards of measure don't really produce results that match with what Pingdom is trying to describe here (that "number of real websites" thing):

"Webhosting.info and some other sites relate the size of a web hosting company to the number of domain names that point to their DNS servers. This is why dedicated registrars to whom hosting is only a side business can often end up at the top of these hosting lists, because all domain names, hosted or not, are taken into account. It doesn't tell us how many actual hosting customers they have or how many real websites they are hosting."

Pingdom's answer to this problem is a formula that takes into account, in this order: number of domain names, website traffic and google search volume.

Overall, the company's analysis places 1&1 Internet as the largest host, with HostGator and BlueHost/HostMonster as the runners up, with greater growth and gaining on 1&1.

It's interesting information, but I can't help but feel like some information was left out.

Obviously, it's very important to consider how they're defining "largest" webhost. It's pretty explicitly stated in the post that they're trying to determine who is hosting the most websites. That probably eliminates some of the large enterprise hosts, like Rackspace, from the running. A big company, but probably has well short of a million customers.

But there are still a couple of obvious questions, such as:

How do we account for dedicated or colo companies like The Planet, which last I heard was hosting the servers for HostGator? Does HostGator only count as one customer? If so, I might suggest that this "number of customers" measure doesn't really account for a few of the really important distinctions in the hosting business.

What about GoDaddy? Is it really not on this list? Are they not counting Go Daddy as a hosting company because of its original focus on domain names? I think that might be more than a little bit of an oversight.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting and thoughtful post, even if the conclusions might be a bit confusing (to me).

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