New data released on Thursday from Pingdom shows that Houston, Texas singlehandedly hosts more than 50,000 of the world’s top one million websites
New data released on Thursday from Pingdom shows that Houston, Texas singlehandedly hosts more than 50,000 of the world’s top one million websites.
According to data collected at the end of February by a Pingdom script, 7,986 cities in the world host Alexa’s top one million sites.
The top ten cities combined account for just over 22 percent of the top million, and the top three cities combined – Houston, Texas; Mountain View, California; and Dallas, Texas – account for about 10 percent of the top million sites.
Of the top five web hosting cities, three are in Texas. This should be no surprise to those in the web hosting industry as Houston, Dallas and San Antonio are cities with strong infrastructure and a high concentration of hosting providers.
Scottsdale, AZ, Provo, UT, Ashburn, VA, San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, and Beijing, China round out the top ten cities.
Though the US dominates the top ten web hosting cities, further down the list there is representation from around the world, including Canada, Japan, Russia, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Thailand, Taiwan, Bahamas, South Korea, Turkey, Vietnam, India, Argentina, Hong Kong, Australia, Ukraine, and Brazil. Web hosting truly is an international business and it is interesting to see where concentrations of the top million websites are.
The list is accompanied by an interactive world map that shows cities with one or more sites in the top million marked with blue dots. According to Pingdom, the size of the dots represents how many sites are hosted in each city. This comes as PEER 1 released a map of the Internet app that shows how the networks around the world interconnect to create the Internet.
Last year, Pingdom found that only 0.27 percent of the top one million sites are hosted in Africa.
Talk back: Did you know that Texas is home to more than 50K of the world’s top one million websites? Does any of the data Pingdom collected surprise you? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
