Web Hosting Statistics 2022 To Understand Trends, State Of Hosting Industry

Web Hosting Statistics: We can’t imagine a day without the internet. With the digitalization of almost everything, from banking to booking movie tickets, we spend a considerable amount of time using the internet. To make these services easily accessible, active websites are needed. They are not just a place where you can avail certain services to get information but they are also a platform that can help you grow your business. This has led to a considerable increase in the number of websites of late. As every website needs a host to exist, it has resulted in remarkable growth in the hosting industry too.

The hosting industry is considered to be the backbone of today’s digital revolution. A number of web hosting service providers are powering around two billion websites registered on the internet around the world. As hosting services are at the core of today’s online presence, you need to understand some key web hosting stats. In this article, we are going to share fascinating web hosting stats that will help you make a better judgment. Let’s start with some most impressive web hosting stats of 2022.

Key Web Hosting Statistics

• In 2022, there are supposed to be around 2 billion websites. The number of registered websites in 2021 was over 1.8 billion.
• However, only 25% of those websites were active at that time.
• There are over 330,000 web hosting providers around the world in 2021.
• According to Siteefy, there are 200,674,843 active websites as of March 2022 in the world and the number of inactive websites is 968,946,344.
• This means that the number of active websites at the moment is 5 times less than the total number of inactive websites all over the world.
• Data for 2021 suggest that there are more than 330,000 web hosting providers.
• It is pertinent to mention that more than 56% of the global web hosting market is dominated by only the top ten leading web hosting providers.
• The market size of the web hosting industry in 2019 was valued at USD 56.7 billion.
• This is expected to grow into a market size of over USD 171 billion by 2027.
• While most hosting providers are in North America, over 50 million domains are hosted in the United States. This means that the US hosts around 27% of all domains registered.
• China is the second country that has the highest number of domains registered. The figure is expected to be around 16 million.
• Of all the websites, 34% has been built on the WordPress platform.
• Web hosting provider GoDaddy is one of the most popular providers in the United States.
• GoDaddy cover around 20% of the web hosting market, followed by Amazon AWS and others.
• The United States leads the list of the maximum number of domains hosted by any country.
• It was in 1969 when the first 4 hosts got registered.

Web Hosting Interesting Facts

• info.cern.ch is the first website and is almost 30 years old. It is still running.
• The number of telephone users reached the mark of 50 million in 75 years. Radio and television took 38 years and 13 years respectively to touch this figure. But, it took the internet just four years to do so.
• Among the top 10 domain name extensions are .com, .tk(Tokelau), .cn(China), .de(Germany), .net, and .uk (United Kingdom).
• The largest country-specific top-level domains (TLDs) include – .cn(China), .tk (Tokelau), .de (Germany)
  .uk (United Kingdom) .ru (Russia) .ga (Gabon) .cf (Central African Republic) .nl (Netherlands) .ml (Mali)
  and .fr (France).
• According to GoDaddy, the most expensive domain name sold up to 2019 was cars.com worth USD 872 million.
• The most expensive domain names include – carinsurance.com (USD 49.7 million), insurance.com (USD 35.6
  million), privatejet.com (USD 30.18million), hotels.com (USD 11 million), fb.com (USD 8.5 million), and business.com (UDD 7.5 million).
• 40% of consumers don’t want to wait for more than three seconds to let a website load.
• Also, one in every four visitors would abandon the website that would take more than 4 seconds to load.
• While 46% of users don’t visit poorly performing websites again, a second delay and loading a website reduces customer satisfaction by 16%.
• It is worth mentioning that 64% of shoppers will shop somewhere else if they are not satisfied with the site they visited.
• Loading time also affects bounce rate. For example, pages that load within two seconds have a lower bounce rate of 9%. This increases to 38% if the pages take 5 seconds to load.
• According to a 2021 report, mobile online social media users are the fastest-growing segment of internet users.
• The most used content management systems (CMS) are WordPress (17.67%), Wix (3.11%), Shopify
  (0.66%), Drupal (0.56%), and Sitefinity (0.56%).
• Among the most used programming languages are PHP (28.62%), Microsoft ASP.NET (11.25%), Lua(4.36%), Java (0.67%), and Ruby (0.48%).

Web Hosting Market Share and Size Statistics

• According to Netcraft’s survey of March 2022, there was a loss of 4 million sites but a gain of 977,000 domains and 103,000 web facing computers.
• The one that gained the largest number of sites in the March 2022 survey was Cloudflare. It has 1.32 million more sites than in the February survey.
• Cloudflare showed consistency in other metrics as well. It gained over 176,000 domains and more than 256,000 active sites.
• Netcraft survey showed that the current leader by most metrics is nginx. It had particularly strong growth in terms of domains. nginx gained 978,000 domains in March. This was the largest gain by any vendor.
• Though nginx lost 2.98 million sites, as the Netcraft survey of March 2022, the number of active sites increased by 158,000.
• OpenResty, which uses nginx, is serving 62,300 more active sites. It was counted on 6,640 more computers in March 2022 than last month.
• The survey also suggested that Apache has the greatest number of active sites though by a thin margin over nginx.
• Apache, however, lost 583,000 active sites and 2,130 of the top one million.
• Tech giant Microsoft saw a decline in all metrics in the month of March. It lost 3.22 million sites and 156,000 domains.
• Apart from losing 118,000 active sites, Microsoft also lost 1,000 sites from its share of the top million.
• Despite being one of the smaller web servers on the market, LiteSpeed has recorded strong and consistent growth. Netcraft data of March 2022 showed that it had the largest sites and active site growth among all web servers.
• LiteSpeed gained 1.92 million sites and 277,000 active sites in March 2022.

Web Hosting Economic Impact Statistics

• For shared hosting, one usually has to pay something between USD 3 to USD 7 per month.
• For VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, the cost goes up to USD 20 to USD 30 per month.
• The VPS market size is projected to reach USD 8.3 billion by 2026.
• The market is dominated by GoDaddy with market share of 23.3%. DreamHost is as distant second with only 1.46% market share. Others in the list are Digital Ocean and 123-Reg.
• According to an estimate, slow loading websites can cost the United States economy more than USD 500 million annually.
• A delay of just one second can decrease conversion rates by as high as 7%
• As per a survey between 2018-2020, 25% of those who participated said that an hour of server downtime can cost anything between USD 301,000 to USD 400,000.
• The domain name industry in the United States was worth USD 7 billion in 2020.
• The dedicated web hosting market share reached USD 6.53 billion in 2020.
• Similarly, the shared web hosting market share reached USD 22 billion in that year.
• The global web hosting market share was USD 32.12 billion and this is expected to grow to USD 83.99 billion by 2023.
• The e-commerce industry generated USD 2 trillion last year. The number is expected to witness a steep surge.
• Over 58% of traffic is coming from smartphones and tablets.
• Cloud computing is the fastest-growing tech service. The public cloud market registered a growth of 17.6% last year.

Web Hosting Domain Statistics

• A domain name is what makes a website complete on planet Web Hosting. This is how a website is recognised and citizens find it. A domain is just like streets names on Earth. Let's have a look at some of the most interesting domain name facts and statistics.
• The market is clearly dominated by .com and accounts for 81% of all domain.
• The second most popular domain can be a little surprising. It is .tk, a property of the island country of Tokelau. It is used by at least 24 million sites.
• On an average, over 900,000 domains get registered every week.
• There are over 3,000 registrars that provide domain registration services.
• At the beginning of web services, there were only nine domain suffixes available to choose from. But this has now gone up to over 1,200 extensions and new extensions are coming up very frequently.
• 322 domain extensions are country-specific. the most popular are .de (11.1%), .cn (10.5%), and .uk (9.09%).

Web Hosting Companies Statistics

The hosting business is growing these days simply because it is easy to start one. All it takes is a couple of web servers. This is probably the reason that the hosting market is heading towards saturation. So let's have a look at some stats related to hosting companies.

1.1 GoDaddy Web Hosting Stats

• GoDaddy is the leader in the industry. The company started its operation in 1997.
• The company has around 19 million clients, 78 million domains, and over 9000 employees.
• GoDaddy has around 11% of the market and the closest rivals are Amazon AWS and 1&1.
• The company offers services across the board. This means that it will provide domain at as low as USD 1 to a dedicated server of USD 179.99 per month.
• 6.3% of the top 10 million websites are hosted by GoDaddy.

1.2 Amazon AWS Web Hosting Stats

• GoDaddy is clearly the leader in the field of web hosting and domain market. But it is Amazon AWS that is the leader in providing cloud solutions.
• Amazon AWS has 64% share in cloud solutions.
• The company has been registering a yearly growth of at least 40% since 2014.
• Netflix is powered by AWS and accounts for one-third of total internet traffic during peak usage times.
• Amazon AWS powers businesses in 190 countries.
• The majority of Amazon AWS servers run on Windows. CentOS and Unix are also in the list of popular system configurations.

1.3 Google Cloud Platform Statistics

• The annualized revenue run rate of Google Cloud is USD 22.16 billion.
• Out of the total revenue of Google in 2020, 7.2% was from Google Cloud.
• 4.6% of the total web hosting market share in 2021 was held by Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• There are over 8 million active websites that are hosted on Google Cloud.
• It is the second-largest web hosting provider globally.

1.4 1&1 IONOS Stats

• The German company was founded in 1988 and recently merged with ProfitBricks to create 1&1 IONOS.
• 1&1 IONOS Stats is present in at least 10 countries and has over 7000 employees.
• It is the third-largest web hosting provider with a total share of 6.7%
• 1&1 IONOS Stats is the leading web hosting provider in Europe.
• It hosts over 20 million domain names

1.5 Hostgator Web Hosting Stats

• Founded in 2002, it took Hostgator just 4 years to pass the threshold of 200,000 domain hosting.
• It has over 2.2% of the market share and hosts over 9 million domain names.
• Hostgator was reportedly acquired by EIG for an amount of USD 299.8 million, with USD 227.3 million paid in cash.
• Most of the clients of Hostgator are from Bluehost and GoDaddy.
• It fell prey to a hacker attack in 2012 and as a result, details of 500,000 accounts and cards were available in the public domain.

Interesting Facts About Web Hosting

• Except for Antartica, web hosting services are available on every continent.
• The first.com domain to be registered on the internet was Symbolics.com. It was registered on March 15, 1985.
• The World Wide Web (or www) was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991.
• It was on August 6, 1991 when the first-ever website was published.
• Of all internet traffic globally, 51.8% is because of bots.
• WordPress has so far released 317 versions of WordPress.
• The first Internet Service Providers were launched way back in 1989.
• Angelfire, GeoCities, and Tripod were among the first few web-hosting providers that were launched in 1995.
• The highest number of internet users are from Asia.

Conclusion

With everything going digital these days, web hosting is surely going to play a key role. As it is evident that the number of internet users will increase manifold in near future, the web hosting industry too has good prospects. It is projected to continue growing at a CAGR of 15.5% until 2027 and the overall market value would be around USD 171.4 billion by 2027.

Pramod Pawar

Pramod is an entrepreneur and has a background both in technology, web development, and digital marketing. In his early years of his career, Pramod worked with various market research agencies. These ranged from small startup businesses to large-scale online marketing agencies. This gave him the opportunity to connect with large-scale companies worldwide. He has over 10 years experience in market research and digital marketing.