(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Independent Internet services company Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) has unveiled a dataset that tracks the changes in the hosting locations of the million busiest websites, revealing the flow of sites moving from one hosting provider to another during the course of the month.
The dataset provides a guide to the market share and dynamics of companies hosting the sites responsible for the great majority of web traffic, and is largely uninfluenced by parked domains, personal sites, shared hosting accounts or the majority of blogs. According to a Thursday blog post from Netcraft, to gain the data needed for this analysis, the company combined its monthly survey of the busiest sites (calculated using data from users of the Netcraft Toolbar) with detailed hosting information gathered by its Web Server Survey, and compared this data with the previous month.
According to the results, many site locations remained unchanged, however, some will moved from one hosting provider to another during the course of the month. As well, some hosting companies gained new sites not previously in the top million, and lost sites that are no longer active. The Planet (www.theplanet.com), for instance, gained 372 hostnames in April, a 1.1 percent gain over March. The iomart group (www.iomart.com) won over 96 websites, reporting a 3.6 percent gain from the previous month. Netcraft data shows which company form which new customers came, and where customers went when leaving a hosting provider.
Although the top 1,000 sites are concentrated among the top web superpowers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay) the hosting locations of the top million sites are widely fragmented, with a little more than 3.25 percent sufficient for top spot.
The dataset is available in an Excel spreadsheet and provides a variety of different filters and selections, allowing a web host to identify its relative position and closest competitors in each of the top 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 tiers of site traffic, as well as by country, and operating system. The dataset is updated each month and is available on a per-company license basis.
