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.
Then, here are the 100 cities that host the most of the sites in the top million:
| 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
thx! very interesting!
There are some towns on there with no significant Internet infrastructure at all. Apparently Tea Gardens, NSW, Australia has 3 sites in the top million. I’m sure that would be a pleasant surprise to the 2000 people living in this quiet little seaside town. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Gardens,_New_South_Wales
@supine That’s interesting, thanks for the input.
Can you please tell me specifically what websites are hosted in Venezuela? This is insane.
@ssthormess We will try to put that together for you.
@pingdom Thanks.
@pingdom whoops, thanks for the catch! Fixed now.
@pingdom Thanks for the full list. Still interesting, but amazing to think the “Top One Million” is limiting in 2013 @dan_germain @theWHIR
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 ?
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.
@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.
@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.
wow europe:D
ye kya hai bhai samaj koni ayo?
ale dużo w Polsce 😀
Europe is cluttered
Puneeth, zoom in on the interactive map in the article on our site and you can see what it looks like in more detail.
andyleaning Is based on sites in Alex top 1M, so guess there’s some bias in there – who uses Alexa?
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?
@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.
interesting//
joelchornik nunca hubiera pensado q houston se llevaba tantos
biosshadow but 30% of that are botnet C&C…
@pingdom, royal.pingdom.com is not working right now, so I can’t read the article.
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.
Are you still having problems with that Krzysztof?
tstoliker thanks for passing this on. Another example of great things happening here in #LoveLansing
Burmooda triangle
Why isn’t Asia on the map??
@pingdom your blog doesn’t load here either. India.
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.
We Argentina. I think sites in the world where growth will be <a href=http://mulatahosting.com/>hosting </a> Chinese and truly exponential growth.
Winooski Littenberg vcastro Sorry guys, I may have let a few “copy” CRON jobs get out of hand . . .
Winooski Littenberg Though someone borked the symbology on that map; no #btv. Add “allow-overlap:true;”
Littenberg Ooops, that’s Burlington, MA. But, hey, Winooski has 1!
I know my locacalization.