Hosting Industry Centralization and Consolidation

TL;DR

This study analyzes the concentration of the Internet hosting industry, revealing significant US dominance in global domains and local providers in country-specific TLDs, with stable overall market shares over four years.

Contribution

It provides an empirical measurement of hosting industry centralization across multiple TLDs using active network measurements.

Findings

One-third of domains are hosted by five US-based providers.

Local providers dominate ccTLD hosting, especially in non-US markets.

US hosting companies are increasing their presence in high-traffic ccTLD domains.

Abstract

There have been growing concerns about the concentration and centralization of Internet infrastructure. In this work, we scrutinize the hosting industry on the Internet by using active measurements, covering 19 Top-Level Domains (TLDs). We show how the market is heavily concentrated: 1/3 of the domains are hosted by only 5 hosting providers, all US-based companies. For the country-code TLDs (ccTLDs), however, hosting is primarily done by local, national hosting providers and not by the large American cloud and content providers. We show how shared languages (and borders) shape the hosting market -- German hosting companies have a notable presence in Austrian and Swiss markets, given they all share German as official language. While hosting concentration has been relatively high and stable over the past four years, we see that American hosting companies have been continuously increasing their presence in the market related to high traffic, popular domains within ccTLDs -- except for Russia, notably.