1&1 Internet and Yahoo continued their strong organic growth in the shared hosting sector, as 1&1 added 148K new sites and Yahoo had 100K new signups, helping both companies post strong net gains.

MCI, which is the target of a takeover battle between Verizon and Qwest, gained 54K hostnames last month, including 45.3K hostnames switching in from Netfirms. The telecom company now houses nearly 1 million hostnames in its hosting business.

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.