Go Daddy gained 116K hostnames in November, more than doubling the growth of every other provider, according to our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis. German hosting giant 1&1 Internet was a distant second with a net gain of 54K hostnames, while Yahoo! was the only other provider to grow by more than 16K. That marks a slowdown from October, when the top four companies grew by at least 50K hostnames and the top 10 all gained 21K or more.

Go Daddy continued to set the pace for domain registrars, adding 151K new hostnames (compared to 61K for Network Solutions and 21K for eNom) while seeing about 40K expire. It was also a strong month for telecom hosting units, as Sprint, SBC Communications, Level 3 and Deutsche Telekom each gained more than 10K hostnames.

Growth levelled off in November at EV1Servers.net, which experienced a small drop in hostnames after months of growing by about 50K per month. Nearly 400 competitors gained sites from EV1Servers last month, paced by CalPop (2,111 hostnames), Global Network Access (1,590), Internap (1,191), BurstNet (769) and The Planet (730). Capacity issues may have been a a factor, as the Houston-based dedicated server company completed an upgrade of its power infrastructure. EV1Servers has been wrestling with power issues since August, when it maxed out its electric service from CenterPoint Energy and had to suspend a popular $1 setup promotion.

Our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis identifies movements of sites from one hosting provider to another. The analysis is updated monthly and is available on a company license basis.