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
