Web Hosting Industry Statistics, Data and Market Trends

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To many people, web hosting is merely a service for them to run their websites on. The industry is massive and there are many more services than just shared hosting. We at HostScore keep our finger on the pulse of the industry. This helps us to offer comprehensive web hosting advice based on quantitative data.

This list of facts and figures is an example of the type of statistics we monitor. They help give us an idea of industry standards and norms, allowing us to more accurately gauge guidelines and parameters optimally.

All the data we follow is from reputable sources which are well known in the industry.

Web Hosting Industry

Size of global web hosting market
The global web hosting market is expected to grow at compounded annual growth rate of 13.25%, reaching more than $216 billion in total worth by year 2025.

Market Size

  • The global web hosting market is expected to reach $216.59 billion by 2025 (was $90.64 billion in 2018), at a CAGR of 13.25%.
  • The global website builder market is expected to generate $13,605 million by 2027 (was $6,525 million in 2018), at a CAGR of 9.4%.
  • The worldwide VPS market is expected to reach $8.4 billion by 2025 (was $2.9 billion in 2018), at a CAGR above 16.6%.
  • There are over 1.7 billion websites online but less than 200 million websites are active.

Regional Interests

  • The Southeast Asia web hosting market is projected to reach $4.67 billion by 2025 (was $1.55 billion in 2017), at a CAGR of 14.6%.
  • North America held almost 50% of the global web hosting market share and expected to expand at a considerable CAGR by 2025.

Notable Brands & Market Take-up Rate

  • Top 5 web hosting providers in the market are GoDaddy Group (6.3%), Amazon (5.9%), Endurance Group (4.9%), Google (4.3%) and OVH (4.0%), per w3techs.
  • Endurance International Group (EIG) owns more than 80 hosting brands, capturing approximately 4.8 million subscribers in 2018.
  • EIG made $19.37 in revenue per subscriber for 2018, roughly 3% higher than 2017 ($18.82).
  • Amazon owns 47.8% of the public cloud services, making them the No.1 IaaS provider in the market.
  • The worldwide IaaS market grew 31.3% to total $32.4 billion in 2018, up from $24.7 billion in 2017, per Gartner.
  • Amazon is recorded with an estimated $15.5 billion of revenue for IaaS public cloud market in 2018, up 27% from 2017.
  • Per Builtwith, among the top 1 million websites:
    • Top 3 WordPress hosting providers are WP Engine (2.72%), InMotion Hosting (0.76%), Kinsta (0.21%).
    • Top 5 email hosting providers are GoDaddy email (4.66%), Rackspace email hosting (1.12%), Namecheap (0.56%), 1&1 (0.55%), Dreamhost (0.49%).
    • Top 5 self-hosted platforms or website builders are Shopify (2.72%), Squarespace (1.16%), Wix (0.75%), BigCommerce (0.44%), Weebly (0.31%).

Domain Industry

The 10 largest country level top level domain (ccTLD) by number
The 10 largest country level top level domain (ccTLD) by number of reported domain names were .cn, .tk, .de, .uk, .tw, .nl, .ru, .br, .eu, and .fr.

Volume and Prices

  • There are 351.8 million domain name registrations in the first quarter of 2019.
  • Top 5 largest TLDs were .com (141.0 mil), .cn (23.0 mil), .tk (22.5 mil), .de (16.2 mil), .net (13.8 mil) as of March 2019.
  • Both .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of 154.8 million domain name registrations in the first quarter of 2019.
  • Both .com and .net had a combined increase of 6.5 million domain name registrations, or 4.4% YOY.
  • Domain name registrations across all TLDs have grown by 18 million, or 5.4% YOY.
  • Lasvegas.com was sold to Vegas.com for $90 million (to be paid out over 35 years). The deal was recorded as the most expensive domain name thus far in Internet history.
  • Top 3 most expensive domain names sold in the history were LasVegas.com (2005 – 2040) – $90 milllion, CarInsurance.com (2010) – $49.7 million, Insurance.com (2010) – $35.6 million.
  • There is an indicative correlation between price and web server performance.

Performance and Security Optimization

Server Software Statistics - Apache still the most popular.
Apache is still the most popular server software. As of September 2019, Apache is used by 34.2% of top 1,000,000 websites, 23.5% of top 100,000 websites, 18% of top 10,000 websites, and 15.4% of top 1,000 websites.

As digitalization spreads across the globe, two key aspects of web hosting have increasingly come under focus: Performance and Security.

Market growth has led to high competition and knowledgeably consumers have grown more demanding. A millisecond in response speed or an hour of downtime can translate to millions in revenue for websites today. This combined with heightened cyber-security threats have been a driving force of change.

  • Every 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7% and a two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103%, per Akamai.
  • The fastest eCommerce website loads in just 0.324 seconds, while the average eCommerce page load speed is at 2.67 seconds, per Pingdom.
  • The average downtime costs per minute for small businesses range from $137 to $427 per minutes, per Carbonite.
  • The average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute for the larger company, per Gartner.
  • For a company like Amazon, a minute of downtime costs the company to lose as much as $220,318.
  • Apache and Nginx are the two most popular web servers in the market. Both had a combined of almost 75% of the market shares – Apache (44%), Nginx (30.8%), per w3techs.
  • Plesk (84.39%) and cPanel (13.84%) are the top control panel for web hosting in the Alexa top 1 million sites.
  • WordPress, used by over 35% of all websites, accounted for 90% of all hacked CMS sites in 2018.
  • Cross-site Scripting and SQL Injection are two most common attacks seen in WordPress sites.
  • Cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015, per Cybersecurity Ventures.
  • A significant increase in both the quantity and quality of DDoS attacks is recorded in Q1 2020. 

Credits & References

Article by Jason Chow

Jason Chow is the man behind the marketing and outreach program. He seeks the best way to boost readership reach using everything from keyword research to marketing skills. He is actively connecting with sites to build relationships and establish links.
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