The largest of the hosting companies showing fast growth but where we found fewer than 600 servers a year ago are:

Fastest Growing Small Hosting Providers by % Increase in Web Visible Servers September 2002 to October 2003 Parent Company Sept-02 Oct-03 % Change Main Business Area Hetzner Online AG 203 1,728 +751% Mixed Hosting net@ccess 203 1,260 +521% Mixed Hosting ThePlanet.com 278 1,298 +367% Mixed Hosting ServerBeach – 1,217 – Dedicated Yahoo! 136 525 286% Shared PWebTech 55 448 715% Mixed Hosting

Limitations of the Hosting Provider Server Count include the following;

• Only sites found by the Web Server Survey will be included. The number of hosts found running internet web sites by the Web Server Survey is large [over 42 million in July 2003], but not exhaustive.
• Sites are attributed to companies by performing a reverse DNS lookup on each responding ip address in the Web Server Survey. If reverse DNS lookups have not been configured or otherwise fail, the count for the company will correspondingly reduced. To mitigate this we provide an additional view of the data compiled by Netblock registration. In practice the most successful hosting companies seem to set up reverse DNS correctly.
• Backend machines such as database servers not running web sites will not be counted, as they are unseen from the Internet.
• At most one server will be counted for each site. Round robin DNS, reverse web proxies, load balancing products like Cisco Local Director and BIG-IP and some connection level firewalls hide multiple web servers behind a single hostname.

Full details of the Hosting Provider Server Count are available.