Germany remains well behind the United States, which has more than 24 million web-facing hostnames, but comfortably ahead of the United Kingdom, which has 4.6 million. Italy, the Netherlands and France are the only other European nations with 1 million or more hostnames found in our survey.

Netcraft’s Hosting Provider Switching Analysis identifies movements of sites from one hosting provider to another on a monthly basis. 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. Using the dataset, a hosting company can see both where their new business came from, and the providers to whom it has lost business. It can also see the site switching information for any of the top 1,000 hosting providers on the Internet, as well as which geographic markets are expanding.