Hosting locations of the world’s top one million websites

March 7, 2013 in Data & Analysis

Do you know the hosting locations of the biggest websites in the world? More specifically, do you know in which cities they are located?

Last year we found that 43% of the world’s top one million sites were hosted in the United States, but we felt eager to figure out more exactly where these sites are hosted.

So, to see what could be uncovered, we crunched through the list of the world’s biggest websites.

Hosting locations of your favorite websites

After going through the list of websites, we compiled the numbers and came up with some interesting facts. In total, we found 7,936 cities that between them host the top one million sites in the world.

We plotted all these hosting locations on an interactive map of the world, with the cities with one or more sites in the top million list marked with blue dots. The size of the dots signifies how many sites are hosted in each city.

Be aware that the map might take a while to load. You can also download the map as a picture.

The top 100 web hosting cities

Clicking around on the world map to see if there’s a top website where you live is great fun, but we also wanted to present a list of the cities in the world that host the most top websites.

Remember that the million websites are hosted in almost 8,000 cities. However, it should be noted that the top 10 cities combined account for 223,206 sites or just over 22% of the top million.

The top three cities combined account for about 10% of the top million websites.

What city hosts the biggest number of these top websites? Houston, Texas, in the United States, singlehandedly harbors over 50,000 of these sites, making it the number one city. Mountain View, California, is in the number two slot with almost 30,000 sites.

hosting locations cities top million pingdom

Then, here are the 100 cities that host the most of the sites in the top million:

The top 100 web hosting cities
Number of websites City Country
1 50,598 Houston United States
2 29,594 Mountain View United States
3 24,822 Dallas United States
4 23,210 Scottsdale United States
5 21,808 San Antonio United States
6 20,691 Provo United States
7 14,871 Ashburn United States
8 13,214 San Francisco United States
9 13,125 Chicago United States
10 11,273 Beijing China
11 10,006 New York United States
12 9,412 Los Angeles United States
13 8,170 Lansing United States
14 7,588 Tokyo Japan
15 7,538 Montreal Canada
16 7,380 Culver City United States
17 7,349 Brea United States
18 6,605 Osaka Japan
19 6,296 Atlanta United States
20 6,063 Amsterdam The Netherlands
21 4,546 Moscow Russia
22 4,250 Burlington United States
23 3,823 Wayne United States
24 3,627 Absecon United States
25 3,491 Austin United States
26 3,451 Seattle United States
27 3,449 Orlando United States
28 3,361 Berlin Germany
29 3,176 Columbus United States
30 3,146 Saint Louis United States
31 3,088 Shanghai China
32 2,907 Paris France
33 2,819 Denver United States
34 2,804 Sunnyvale United States
35 2,659 Bangkok Thailand
36 2,619 Englewood United States
37 2,607 Providence United States
38 2,601 Toronto Canada
39 2,579 San Jose United States
40 2,525 Guangzhou China
41 2,366 Tampa United States
42 2,293 London United Kingdom
43 2,283 Phoenix United States
44 2,248 Hangzhou China
45 2,196 Tempe United States
46 2,189 San Diego United States
47 2,181 Fremont United States
48 2,176 Mclean United States
49 2,097 Pittsburgh United States
50 1,957 Nanjing China
51 1,937 Fort Lauderdale United States
52 1,920 Newark United States
53 1,795 Scranton United States
54 1,787 Taipei Taiwan
55 1,775 Media United States
56 1,735 Nassau Bahamas
57 1,703 Seoul South Korea
58 1,693 Anaheim United States
59 1,692 Plano United States
60 1,632 Herndon United States
61 1,520 Gloucester United States
62 1,484 Las Vegas United States
63 1,457 Santa Rosa United States
64 1,448 Fulshear United States
65 1,441 Waltham United States
66 1,428 Kansas City United States
67 1,417 Arlington Heights United States
68 1,395 Miami United States
69 1,361 Sanayi Turkey
70 1,352 Jacksonville United States
71 1,282 Missoula United States
72 1,262 Hanoi Vietnam
73 1,240 Chengdu China
74 1,217 Santa Monica United States
75 1,186 Mumbai India
76 1,181 Wilmington United States
77 1,179 Reston United States
78 1,173 Henan China
79 1,160 Weehawken United States
80 1,158 Chesterfield United States
81 1,150 Buenos Aires Argentina
82 1,136 Charlotte United States
83 1,107 Farmington United States
84 1,102 Orange United States
85 1,102 Matawan United States
86 1,087 Lenexa United States
87 1,066 Simi Valley United States
88 1,046 Hong Kong Hong Kong
89 1,021 Palo Alto United States
90 989 Saint Petersburg Russia
91 973 Sydney Australia
92 968 Kiev Ukraine
93 967 Washington United States
94 965 Ann Arbor United States
95 948 Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam
96 934 Secaucus United States
97 920 Garden City United States
98 913 Porto Alegre Brazil
99 908 Clifton United States
100 898 Mars Turkey

Hosting locations are truly worldwide

Even though the United States has a crushing lead in terms of hosting locations it is gratifying to see that almost every part of the world has at least some site represented in the top million.

What’s your reaction to these numbers? Does it surprise you, for example, that the US has such a lead? Are there parts of the world where you would have expected to see more sites? And going forward, what do you see as the major trends in terms of the geographical location of websites? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter.

About the data: The data was collected February 27, 2013 with a Pingdom developed script that scanned the Alexa top one million sites. Out of these, we successfully scanned 907,625 for the gps-coordinates of the city they are hosted in. Of the remaining 92,375 sites, we were not able to scan 52,539 at all, and 39,836 had no gps-coordinates.

Image (Top) via Shutterstock

36 comments

  6. @pingdom Thanks for the full list. Still interesting, but amazing to think the “Top One Million” is limiting in 2013 @dan_germain @theWHIR

    Reply

  7. Is it possible to have country wise top sites list ? I know the list is quite huge, I meant at least the countries where they host less than probably 100-200 top sites ?

    Reply

  8. I’d be interested in seeing how the top rankings change if you group cities by metropolitan area.  For example, Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Culver City all make the top 100 list. Just adding those three together would put LA into the #6 slot…though of course you’d need to add all of Houston’s suburbs, all the Silicon Valley cities, etc.
     
    I guess the big challenge would be deciding which cities to lump together, especially in areas that are solidly built-out. Sticking with Southern California since that’s what I know, I’d put Brea and Orange together, but someone else might group them with Los Angeles.

    Reply

    1. @KelsonVibber There are so many more groupings and aggregations that could be done with this, and that is a very good idea. We’re also looking at collecting more information when we run this next time, so we can cross reference and compare.

      Reply

    2. @KelsonVibber The big challenge is actually already solved for a lot. Metropolitan Statistical Areas are already a thing in the US, and Canada and Japan have similar groupings, though I can’t remember what the names are there.

      Reply

  13. Puneeth, zoom in on the interactive map in the article on our site and you can see what it looks like in more detail.

    Reply

  15. Very unexpected. I see that there is done a lot in Amsterdam (where I live) as it has the fastest (or most busy, depending on the perspective) internet-IX, but I expected each country to host their sites in their own country/continent.
    Few remarks:
    – Alexa can have huge difference (70k) in just a month while the visitor-analytics would suggest differently.
    – Could you plot the same, but then weighted?
    – CloudFlare is in Houston. Did you filter such services out?

    Reply

    1. @StreamComputing Thanks for the comments. To answer your last question, no we didn’t for this survey but we’re looking at how we can do that for future ones.

      Reply

  20. HI may i know where and what are the sites hosted in Namakkal (Tamil Nadu, India). I could see a small dot with 4 sites hosted!! And its my city too… Thanks.

    Reply

  26. I’m somewhat doubtful about the two Turkish entries. Shouldn´t Sanayi (69) be listed as Izmir (of which it is a suburb)? I can’t find any city named Mars (100) in Turkey at all, but there is a Turkish CDN with that name. Makes you wonder a little how accurate the Alexa locations really are… OTOH, with their current economic growth they will probably have more sites among the top million next year.

    Reply

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