Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

How five top-name web hosting providers have grown since 2005

We decided to analyze how five of the most talked-about web hosting companies have grown over the last few years. The results are really interesting.

Since we didn’t have inside information about these companies, we looked at the number of domain names on their DNS servers, and how these numbers have changed over time (from April 2005 to December 2007).

The web hosting companies we included are:

  1. Dreamhost (625,470)
  2. Ipowerweb/Ipower (414,788)
  3. Bluehost (374,965)
  4. Hostgator (299,463)
  5. Site5 (64,737)

(Domain names in December of 2007 within parenthesis above.)

Number of domain names over time

This graph shows how the total number of domain names have changed over time for the five included web hosting companies.

Domain names over time

Factors that affect growth

We find it interesting how much the growth rate differs between the various companies. For example, we were surprised that Site5 didn’t have more domain names considering how well known they are. If you compare them with Bluehost and Hostgator, which they were close to in 2005, their number of domain names have lagged behind significantly.

Many of us here at Pingdom have a past in the web hosting industry, and over time we have seen many approaches that web hosting companies use to increase their user base.

Some factors that often help web hosting companies grow are:

  • Aggressive affiliate programs, offering plenty of profit sharing and perks to affiliates.
  • Reseller programs.
  • Blogging and being open about their business and the company, usually with a personal touch, giving insights and creating discussion. Dreamhost is very good at this.
  • Discussions in blogs and forums.
  • Overselling (a hotly debated topic, but nevertheless a fact).
  • Lowering hosting prices (often in connection with campaigns).
  • Lowering domain name prices.

A good example of how one single aspect can have a major impact is the Ipowerweb growth spike that started in November 2005. This was in all likelihood fuelled by the announcement that they had dumped their domain name prices to a at that time record-low price point of $2.95. This would maybe also explain the dip that starts about a year later when people either did not renew their domain names or moved them away, since the renewal price was not as low.

To be able to easier see how the growth has changed from month to month we also made a separate graph for that.

Growth in domain names per month

This graph shows the net growth in domain names per month for each of the five web hosting companies, i.e. how much they gained or lost a particular month.

Net growth domain names

Do you have your own take on the numbers presented here? There are so many factors involved, so please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions with us in the comments!

Some notes on the data

We analyzed root zone files for the .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info top-level domains (which we lovingly tend to call CNOBI domains 🙂 ) taken from the time period between April 2005 and December 2007.

Purely using domain names as a basis for estimating the size or success of a web hosting company has some limitations. For example, the website for a domain name could be hosted somewhere else, or it could just be a parked, unused domain name. There will also be a certain number of websites that use other DNS servers than those provided by the web hosting company.

We have done our best to identify the DNS servers of these companies, but there is always the odd chance that we have missed one (though it’s quite unlikely in this case).

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free