November 13, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Charting the busiest online locations, UK research and security firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) has released a dataset showing the hosting locations of the one million busiest websites on the web, showing which hosting providers back the most popular websites.
According to the company’s Wednesday announcement, Netcraft has created an Excel spreadsheet that provides a variety of different filters and selections using data taken from users of the Netcraft Toolbar. The dataset helps a hosting company identify its relative position and closest competitors in each of the top 10,000, 100,000 and one million tiers of site traffic, but it is also divided by region, country, and operating system.
This is an excerpt of Netcraft’s dataset showing data organized into different tiers.
Netcraft found that although the top 1000 sites show a large concentration of online superpowers such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and EBay, the hosting locations of the top million sites are widely fragmented. Of the top million sites, United Internet took top spot, followed by ThePlanet, OVH Net, Google and Rackspace.
Netcraft said its data is not influenced by parked domains, personal sites, shared hosting accounts or the majority of blogs. However, there are limitations on accuracy given that the data is taken from Netcraft Toolbar user usage.
Also, finding a site’s hosting location requires successful DNS lookup on a site’s IP address, meaning that if the DNS lookup fails, the hosting location will be unknown. As well, the dataset does not give access to the underlying web site hostnames; however, selections of site details including hostnames, hosting location, operating system, web server software, traffic and content technologies may be purchased separately.
The dataset will be updated monthly and is available on a company license basis.
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