Netcraft provides extensive reports for use in hosting company acquisition and investment due diligence. The reports provide a valuable independent insight into the company’s development and growth, the types of website, technologies and languages used by its customers and also the amount of criminal activity such as phishing and malware hosted on the company’s infrastructure.
This can be used to corroborate growth patterns and financial information, whilst also identifying issues such as language requirements for support, a small number of customers accounting for a large part of revenue, poor security or undesirable affiliations.
Each of the websites found in our Web Server Survey is attributed to a hosting location using reverse DNS and IP address delegation information. Data for these networks is aggregated to parent companies, providing a detailed view of a hosting company’s infrastructure, with sufficient historical information available to trend back to inception for many hosting companies or at least the mid-late 1990’s.
Consultancy is available to provide expert interpretation, and custom analysis of the available data.
Hosting Statistics
Multiple sizing metrics are available, providing analysis of the number of hostnames, active sites, domains, active domains, IP addresses, web facing computers, SSL certificates, and share of the million busiest websites.
Data is presented in Excel and web formats and provides a variety of filters and selections allowing analysis by country, operating system, and web server software. It is also possible to inspect absolute numbers, rate of growth, and worldwide rankings.
Paid attention to #Netcraft server counts, knew #Amazon were to unveil size of #AWS. Bought in at $389, 1 day later: pic.twitter.com/TzcmQxKgXk
– Ian Waring (@ianwaring) April, 2015
Cool stats on our latest investment Digital Ocean— taking web infrastructure market by storm— https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-rise-of-digitalocean.html https://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com
- Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March, 2014
Technology Analysis
Netcraft can perform an extensive customisable analysis of the content being hosted by the company. The full list of websites hosted is available, together with detailed information including:
- Protocol: HTTP and/or HTTPS
- Hostname / Common Name
- SSL Certificate Details
- Domain Name – allowing identification of high-density domains (e.g. blogging sites, forums)
- IP Address and Netblock Delegation information
- Hosting Country & Hosting Continent
- Rank within the million busiest websites
- Forward DNS Owner
- Operating System & Server Software
- Language (e.g. English, French)
- Programming Languages ( e.g. PHP, ASP.net)
- Client Side Frameworks
- Advertising Networks
- Ecommerce Technology
- Domain Holding & Parking Services
Phishing & Malware Reports
Netcraft’s continuously updated, validated malicious site feeds are used throughout the internet infrastructure industry. All of the main web browsers, along with the major anti-virus companies, firewall vendors, SSL certificate authorities, large hosting companies and domain registrars/registries use Netcraft’s feeds to protect their user communities. Since Netcraft first launched its anti-phishing system in 2005, over 90 million unique phishing sites have been detected and blocked [October 2020] .
Netcraft can provide a detailed report showing current and historic occurrences of phishing and malware at any hosting company. In addition to the full list of fraudulent URLs, the report allows analysis by registrar, name server, country, phishing target, and provides a trend over time. 
Performance Monitoring
Netcraft measures the response times of many leading hosting provider websites, and can provide historic performance measurements and outage data going back many years. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.
The performance of a hosting company’s own website can give an indicative view of the performance of their network. The number of failed requests and time to connect to the site gives the clearest indication of network capacity and congestion, with the least impact from the performance of the company’s own web servers.
More Information
This dataset and analysis is available on a company license basis, and can be tailored to meet your specific needs.