May was a good month for European providers, who occupy three of the top four spots in our monthly roundup of the fastest-growing hosting companies. Go Daddy led all providers with a net gain of 170k hostnames, followed by 1&1 Internet, France's Gandi, and Germany's Tect AG.

German hosting giant 1&1 Internet is set to exceed 4 million web sites within the next month, with most of its gains coming through new customers, as opposed to those switching from other providers. As a result, 1&1's strong entry into the U.S. market hasn't drained customers from other providers, as some American hosts had feared. During May, 1&1's schlund.us unit had a net gain of 29k hostnames, of which 26k were "new" hostnames not previously found in our survey. No U.S. provider had more than 400 hostnames switch away to 1&1 last month.

At the other end of the spectrum is The Planet, which had a net gain of 54k hostnames as it continues to pull customers from competing services, including big gains from EV1Servers (7.2k), Interland (4.6k) and Net Access (4.3k). Lycos Europe (17k), Host Europe (16.7k) and Italy's Aruba (15k) also had healthy gains.

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.