A table of the Hosting Providers who grew the fastest over the 6 months October 2003 to April 2004 is provided as an excerpt from our Hosting Provider Server Count. Companies are included in the filter if they started October 2003 with more than 600 servers, and finished April 2004 with at least 2000, and grew at a rate of 25% or better. This removes hosters which can show a significant percentage increase simply by virtue of being small at the start of the period.

Comparing with last quarter shows percentage growth down somewhat amongst the companies at the top of the list, although absolute growth in terms of servers is larger in this quarter.

Growth at 1&1 Internet, EV1Servers and ThePlanet is relentless, considerably outpacing other hosting locations, and these three companies top our Sites on the Move page on most days as sites continue to migrate to them.

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 50 million in May 2004], 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.

Please contact us for further details.