The top 100 web hosting countries

Last week we showed that the top 1 million web sites in the world were hosted in almost 8,000 different cites. If these top sites were evenly distributed across the world, there would be about 5,900 sites hosted in each nation, but is that really the case?

Following up our own 2012 study, we present this year’s survey of the top 100 web hosting countries. What do you think the major developments were since last year?

Top 20 web hosting countries

In total, we identified 191 different countries that hosted one or more of the Alexa top million web sites. This means that over 90% of the world’s nations host at least one of the top million sites. But they are not at all evenly distributed. To start of, here is a chart of the top 20:

Some comparisons with last years study:

• The top 4, with the United States, Germany, China and the United Kingdom, have not changed.
• The United States is still in a big lead, hosting about 42% of the top million sites. Germany, in second place, host only about 7%.
• Russia is up to 5th place from 7th, passing France and Japan.
• Poland is up from 13th place to 10th, passing Brazil, Italy and Spain.
• Italy is down three places to 13th.
• Singapore and Sweden are both new on the list.
• Hong Kong and South Korea has lost their places on the list since 2012.

US vs Europe and Asia

Grouping the European and Asian countries into regions may give us some perspective of just how crushing the lead for the United States is.

If we compare the United States, with 42.1% of the sites, to Europe, with 31.4%, it may not be the exact same numbers as last year but they are well within the margin of error. Asia is far behind both Europe and the United States, hosting  just over 11% of the top sites.

It should be noted that these three regions together hosts almost 84% of the sites we where able to scan.

Top 100 countries

In addition to the top 20 chart, here are the top 100 nations.

Top 100 web hosting countries

Ranking 2013	Country	Sites	Ranking 2012
1	United States	421,228	1
2	Germany	70,587	2
3	China	35,908	3
4	United Kingdom	35,500	4
5	Russia	35,245	7
6	France	34,498	5
7	Japan	29,898	6
8	Netherlands	25,632	6
9	Canada	18,116	9
10	Poland	12,109	13
11	Spain	12,062	11
12	Brazil	10,807	12
13	Italy	9,764	10
14	Turkey	8,498	14
15	Ukraine	8,401	16
16	Czech Republic	7,319	17
17	Australia	7,299	15
18	India	7,254	18
19	Singapore	5,479	22
20	Sweden	5,201	21
21	Hong Kong	4,641	19
22	Romania	4,417	27
23	Korea (South)	4,252	20
24	Denmark	4,170	25
25	Ireland	4,109	24
26	Switzerland	4,014	26
27	Vietnam	3,944	28
28	Iran	3,925	32
29	Thailand	3,921	23
30	Indonesia	3,671	30
31	Virgin Islands	3,397	36
32	Hungary	3,044	29
33	Taiwan	2,901	31
34	Austria	2,351	33
35	Argentina	2,291	34
36	Belgium	2,275	37
37	South Africa	2,096	39
38	Malaysia	1,996	35
39	Bulgaria	1,994	42
40	Norway	1,961	38
41	Israel	1,775	40
42	Portugal	1,757	41
43	Bahamas	1,739	45
44	Finland	1,687	43
45	Slovakia	1,372	47
46	Lithuania	1,333	46
47	Pakistan	1,225	44
48	Mexico	1,156	49
49	Latvia	1,107	51
50	New Zealand	1,040	48
51	Greece	914	54
52	Belarus	900	53
53	Kazakhstan	864	55
54	Slovenia	859	52
55	Chile	839	50
56	Luxembourg	665	57
57	Estonia	657	56
58	Croatia	579	58
59	Colombia	458	59
60	Serbia	443	61
61	Saudi Arabia	375	63
62	Cyprus	362	65
63	Panama	346	60
64	Venezuela	338	64
65	Azerbaijan	324	68
66	Philippines	324	62
67	Egypt	319	69
68	Iceland	319	75
69	United Arab Emirates	303	67
70	Georgia	244	71
71	Moldova	221	70
72	Malta	217	–
73	Costa Rica	211	73
74	Uzbekistan	203	–
75	Peru	175	66
76	Mongolia	168	74
77	Macedonia	134	81
78	Bangladesh	122	80
79	Ecuador	121	77
80	Sri Lanka	116	78
81	Kuwait	108	86
82	Bosnia and Herzegovina	107	85
83	Uruguay	101	84
84	Kyrgyzstan	86	89
85	Morocco	86	82
86	Curaçao	84	83
87	Cayman Islands	79	79
88	Armenia	76	87
89	Dominican Republic	75	88
90	Nigeria	74	98
91	Jordan	69	93
92	Bahrain	65	–
93	Tunisia	64	–
94	Cambodia	63	–
95	Seychelles	60	90
96	Qatar	59	92
97	Kenya	57	91
98	Algeria	51	–
99	Puerto Rico	49	97
100	Liechtenstein	47	94

As you can see, five countries are new on the list: Algeria, Bahrain, Cambodia, Malta and Tunisia. The ones that have fallen out of the list are Belize, Bolivia, Mauritius, San Marino and Syria.

Will web hosting in Asia catch up?

Last year we asked ourselves if the rest of the world would catch up with the United States. Looking at this year’s results, there are no signs of that happening any time soon.

What will be interesting to see is what will happen to web hosting in Asia. More than 25% of the Internet users of the world already live in Asia; will that start to show in hosting locations to? Let us now what you think.

About the data: The data was collected February 27, 2013, with a Pingdom-developed script that successfully scanned 907,625 out of Alexa’s top 1 million sites. The remaining sites failed to be scanned for various reasons. We should point out that web hosting is a constantly moving target, so where a particular site is hosted may have changed by the time you read this.