That said, the two companies’ operations differ significantly, with 1&1 having a very large based hosting operation with a broad mix of dedicated, shared and domain registration, while Go Daddy’s primary marketing plan could be characterized as selling as many domains as it can, and then upsell shared hosting or dedicated servers to its domain customers.

Elsewhere, one large move was that of the domain parking service RentalQueue which moved from The Planet to Sago Networks, shifting 220,000 hostnames to the new provider. RentalQueue places pay-per-click advertising on parked domains, splitting the revenue with domain owners. Hosting switches by domain parking services routinely shift huge numbers of hostnames between providers.

Netcraft’s Hosting Provider Switching Analysis identifies movements of sites from one hosting provider to another on a monthly basis. Netcraft compares the hosting location of each site found by the Web Server Survey as indicated by the DNS with the equivalent information for the same site in the previous month. Analyzing this information presents a unique bird’s eye view of the hosting industry, identifying winners who are able to take sites from other hosting companies, and persuade people developing new sites to host those sites with them.