Quantifying the size of the hosting business, be it on a national, European or international scale, is something that fascinates people in the business and its observers.
There are a number of services and sites that aim to provide “market intelligence”, however they are sometimes anything but intelligent in their methodology or results.
DirectI’s webhosting.info, for example, ignores ccTLDs cannot differentiate between a registrar parking a bunch of domains on their nameservers and an actual hosting company. It also lists the .info registry as a hosting company, which skews the stats completely.
Other services, such as that provided by Netcraft, track server usage, hostnames to IP and other such data. Some of it is interesting. Some of it is tedious.
A new entrant in this arena is IPWalk which is currently “beta”.
The interface is attractive and very fast, though the information provided isn’t that different to Webhosting.info
What is interesting is that they seem to be intent on expanding to include other TLDs. At present they have data on CNOIB and .edu
Looks like just another webhosting.info – data without analysis. I wonder if they ran across the false transfer problem yet? It seems that everyone in the hosting business gets these ideas from time to time but few if any have much of a clue as to the sheer hard work that goes into the analysis part of such a project.
I’ve been thinking of putting a global hoster history site together with data going back to around 2001 or so. I’ve got the data around here somewhere.
IMHO, jmcc’s data is the most accurate, inciteful and useful I’ve certainly seen to date.
A bit of competition never hurt 🙂
I’ve taken a brief look at the site. The nameserver/hosting seems to be IP based and it does seem to have problems with multiple homed nameservers. Some key Irish hosters are missing as are at least 60 % of the Irish hosting business.
I’ll let webhosting.info/ipwalk fight it out amongst themselves. Cue the Bill Hicks sketch about the Iran-Iraq war. 🙂
John
From what I’ve seen the methodology does seem very similar to webhosting.info
Whether they’ll be able to offer features that make it more valuable to the industry is a matter of time I guess.
They’ll have to do a lot of work to gain the public’s attention.
It is a comparatively new site Michele,
It is different from webhosting.info in that it is a lot cleaner from a design view point. The things that I pointed out are easily fixed. I think it has a very good chance against webhosting.info.