SAVVIS Communications grew by more than 800 percent in April as it integrated the U.S. hosting assets of Cable & Wireless, which it purchased in a February bankruptcy court auction for $155 million. The shift of more than 350k hostnames from C&W to SAVVIS is one of the largest distress sales to result from the collapse of the telecom/dot-com market.

But that huge block of hostnames doesn't equate to nearly that many accounts. Over 161K of those hostnames belong to Fabulous.com, and 60K to Domain Active. At the time of auction, C&W's 1,00 hosting customers included General Electric, Starbucks, Office Max, CBS Sportsline and Slashdot.

Top Hosting Providers By Growth, March 04 to April 04 Hosting Company Mar 04 Apr 04 Growth % Growth Primary Region SAVVIS Communications 48,043 434,575 386,532 804.6% America GoDaddy Inc 2,056,231 2,163,143 106,912 5.2% America The Planet 229,829 292,527 62,698 27.3% America Forest.net 116,380 177,456 61,076 52.58% America KT Corporation 125,513 177,839 52,326 41.78% S. Korea Telus 185,724 233,830 48,106 25.9% Canada EV1Servers 743,309 779,391 36,082 4.9% America China Telecom 104,158 138,131 33,973 32.6% China

Go Daddy added more than 106k hostnames last month, surpassing Tect AG (formerly Strato) to become the second-largest provider, as measured by hostnames. Also moving up on the list was EV1Servers, which had a net gain of 36k to move past MCI into eighth place overall with 779k.

Digital Forest (Forest.net) also has a record month gaining over 61K hostnames on Windows Server 2003, with 43K moving from Ethernext. At the other end of the spectrum was The Planet which grew by over 62.6K hostnames last month, with a large influx of customers from competing hosting companies. The Dallas provider had a net gain of at least 1K hostnames from seven competitors - including EV1Servers (7.2K hostnames), BurstNet (6.9K), Onecall.net (3K), Pegasus Web Tech (1,3K), Hostway (1.3K), Managed.com (1.2K) and NetAccess (1.1K).

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. Country specific versions of the dataset are also available, please contact us for further details.