Netcraft has developed a dataset which tracks the changes in the hosting locations of the million busiest websites. Each month we determine the busiest sites by the number of visits from users of the Netcraft Browser Extension. This is then combined with detailed hosting information gathered by our Web Server Survey, and compared with the equivalent information from the previous month.

Many sites' location will be unchanged, but some will have moved from one hosting provider to another during the course of the month. Additionally, hosting companies may gain new sites that were not previously in the top million, and lose sites which are no longer present.

The dataset gives a guide to the market share 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.

Excerpts from Dec 2017 to Jan 2018

Gains from Not Ranked indicate that a site has entered in to the top million this month. Losses from Not Ranked indicate that the site is no longer in the top million.

Although the top 1000 sites are concentrated amongst the web superpowers, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, the hosting locations of the top million sites are widely fragmented.

Site Detail

An advantage of this dataset over the Hosting Provider Switching Analysis is the ability to analyse movement between competing hosting providers on a per-site basis. With this feature, current and previous hosting locations, netblock, operating system and server software for each site is shown.

The dataset is presented in an Excel spreadsheet and provides a variety of different filters and selections. Using the dataset, a hosting company can identify its relative position and closest competitors in each of the top 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 tiers of site traffic, and also by country, and operating system.

DigitalOcean – Losses & Gains Jan 2018

Limitations

• Only sites found by the Web Server Survey will be included. The number of hosts found worldwide running internet web sites by the Web Server Survey is large (over 1.1 billion hostnames [January 2023] ), but is not exhaustive.
• Attributing a site to a hosting company requires that the hoster provides a reverse DNS server for the network. In some cases where no reverse DNS server is configured, the hoster for a site will be shown as unknown.
• Accesses by the Netcraft Anti-Phishing Extension user community are used to determine site traffic rating.

More Information

The dataset is updated each month and is available on a company license basis.