A table of the Hosting Providers who grew the fastest over the year September 2002 to October 2003 is provided as an excerpt from our latest Hosting Provider Server Count. Companies are included in the filter if they started September 2002 with more than 600 servers, and finished October 2003 with at least 1000, and grew at a rate of 66% or better, year on year. This removes hosters which can show a significant percentage increase by virtue of being small at the start of the period.
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The largest of the hosting companies showing fast growth but where we found fewer than 600 servers a year ago are:
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Limitations of the Hosting Provider Server Count include the following;
- Only sites found by the Web Server Survey will be included. The number of hosts found running internet web sites by the Web Server Survey is large [over 42 million in July 2003], but not exhaustive.
- Sites are attributed to companies by performing a reverse DNS lookup on each responding ip address in the Web Server Survey. If reverse DNS lookups have not been configured or otherwise fail, the count for the company will correspondingly reduced. To mitigate this we provide an additional view of the data compiled by Netblock registration. In practice the most successful hosting companies seem to set up reverse DNS correctly.
- Backend machines such as database servers not running web sites will not be counted, as they are unseen from the Internet.
- At most one server will be counted for each site. Round robin DNS, reverse web proxies, load balancing products like Cisco Local Director and BIG-IP and some connection level firewalls hide multiple web servers behind a single hostname.
Full details of the Hosting Provider Server Count are available.