1. General Web Hosting Market Data
Information in this section is based on a FortuneBusinessInsight’s web hosting market report.
Global web hosting market size:
| wdt_ID | Year | Market Size (Billions) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2013 | 45.3 |
| 2 | 2014 | 51.3 |
| 3 | 2015 | 63.4 |
| 4 | 2016 | 72.5 |
| 5 | 2017 | 85.1 |
| 6 | 2018 | 90.6 |
| 7 | 2019 | 102.1 |
| 8 | 2020 | 116.3 |
| 9 | 2021 | 131.4 |
| 10 | 2022 | 149.1 |
How to read the chart above:
- The global web hosting market in 2018 was worth $90.6 billion
- The market is expected to grow to $216.6 billion by 2025
The expected compound annual growth rate for the forecast period (2019-2025) is 15.1%.
Data up to and including 2018 is historical.
Market share by hosting type (2018):
| wdt_ID | Hosting Type | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shared | 31.7 |
| 2 | Dedicated | 27.9 |
| 3 | Collocated | 16.6 |
| 4 | VPS | 10.3 |
| 5 | Reseller | 13.6 |
How to read the chart above:
- Shared hosting makes up 31.7% of the market
Compound Annual Growth Rate prediction by hosting type (2019-2025):
| wdt_ID | Hosting Type | CAGR |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cloud Hosting | 18.3 |
| 2 | Shared hosting | 10.3 |
| 3 | Dedicated hosting | 5.6 |
How to read the chart above:
- Cloud hosting is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 18.3% pear year during the forecast period
Usage statistics by hosting server location:
| wdt_ID | Server location | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 43.0 |
| 2 | Germany | 9.0 |
| 3 | Russia | 7.2 |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 3.7 |
| 5 | France | 2.9 |
| 6 | Turkey | 2.8 |
| 7 | Japan | 2.5 |
| 8 | Netherlands | 2.3 |
| 9 | China | 2.1 |
| 10 | India | 1.8 |
How to interpret the chart above:
- 43% of websites are hosted on servers located in the United States
- 2.1% of websites are hosted on servers in China
2. Popularity of Different Hosting Solutions
The following data is based on W3Techs‘s April 2020 technology survey.
Importantly, the data is based on the top 10 million websites by traffic, as ranked by Alexa.
The top 10 million sites include all reasonably active websites on the web; if a website gets more than 5-10 visitors per day, it’s almost certainly on Alexa’s top 10 million list.
This means that inactive websites and sites belonging to spammers are not represented in the charts below.
Web hosting usage statistics by website Alexa rank:
Top 10 Million Websites:
| wdt_ID | Web host | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | GoDaddy Group | 6.0 |
| 2 | Amazon AWS | 5.8 |
| 4 | Google Cloud | 3.2 |
| 5 | Hetzner | 3.1 |
| 6 | Shopify | 2.2 |
| 7 | HostGator | 1.9 |
| 8 | DigitalOcean | 1.9 |
| 9 | Squarespace | 1.5 |
| 12 | Bluehost | 1.2 |
| 14 | Liquid Web | 1.0 |
How to interpret the chart above:
- Of the top 10 million websites by traffic, 6% are hosted on servers belonging to the GoDaddy Group.
As you can see, cheap web hosting providers (GoDaddy, HostGator, Bluehost) are very popular in this group of websites.
Top One Million Websites:
| wdt_ID | Provider | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amazon AWS | 9.5 |
| 2 | Hetzner | 3.3 |
| 3 | Google Cloud | 3.2 |
| 4 | GoDaddy | 2.8 |
| 5 | Shopify | 2.4 |
| 6 | DigitalOcean | 2.4 |
| 7 | WP Engine | 1.7 |
| 8 | HostGator | 1.2 |
| 9 | Liquid Web | 1.0 |
| 10 | Rackspace | 0.8 |
How to interpret the chart above:
- Of the top one million websites by traffic, 9.5% are hosted with Amazon’s AWS
Clearly, the top one million websites use cloud hosting (Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean) and dedicated servers (Hetzner) more frequently than the top 10 million sites do.
This is expected, as high-traffic websites often require more server resources than cheap shared hosting can provide.
Top 1,000 Websites:
| wdt_ID | Provider | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amazon AWS | 19.7 |
| 2 | Hetzner | 1.2 |
| 3 | Google Cloud | 8.6 |
| 4 | GoDaddy | 0.4 |
| 5 | Shopify | 0.0 |
| 6 | DigitalOcean | 0.0 |
| 7 | WP Engine | 1.1 |
| 8 | HostGator | 0.0 |
| 9 | Liquid Web | 0.0 |
| 10 | Rackspace | 0.1 |
How to interpret the chart above:
- Of the top 1,000 websites by traffic, 19.7% are hosted with Amazon AWS
Over 30% of the top 1,000 websites are hosted with Amazon AWS or Google Cloud.
Interestingly enough, there are around 10 websites in this group that use WP Engine. Examples include Etsy.com, Mozilla.org, and Fiverr.com
Hosting usage change with website popularity:
The graph below combines information from the three previous charts:
Click on any of the hosting labels above to add or remove a particular host from the comparison for better data visualization. (Try disabling Amazon AWS and Google Cloud, for example.)
Usage statistics by operating system:
| wdt_ID | Operating system | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unix | 69.8 |
| 3 | Windows | 30.2 |
How to interpret the chart above:
- 69.8% of websites are hosted on a server running a Unix system (including Linux, BSD, Darwin, to name a few).
Usage statistics by server software:
| wdt_ID | Server type | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apache | 38.7 |
| 2 | Nginex | 32.0 |
| 3 | Cloudflare | 14.0 |
| 4 | Microsoft-IIS | 8.3 |
| 5 | Litespeed | 6.5 |
| 6 | Google Servers | 1.1 |
| 7 | Node.js | 0.8 |
How to interpret the chart above:
- 38.2% of websites are hosted on an Apache server
Usage statistics by domain:
| wdt_ID | Domain | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | .com | 51.0 |
| 2 | .ru | 6.2 |
| 3 | .org | 4.7 |
| 4 | .net | 3.6 |
| 5 | .in | 1.7 |
| 6 | .uk | 1.5 |
| 7 | .br | 1.5 |
| 8 | .de | 1.5 |
| 9 | .au | 1.4 |
| 10 | Other | 25.3 |
How to interpret the above:
- 51.8% of websites use a .com domain