Web hoster stats/comparison site for the UK?

[jmccormac]

Just toying with the idea of building a web hoster stats (numbers of domains/websites hosted and statistics on UK hosters with the historical trends for each hoster) site for the UK.

Part of it would be a search engine for web hosting services and SEO in the UK.

The obvious question being: is there any web hosting industry site providing accurate data on this kind of thing at the moment?

Regards...jmcc

[Angelis]

www.#*$! provides reverse dns and # of sites hosted on certain IP addresses but you have to signup to recieve the information.

Dont know of any other places you can get that data.

[jmccormac]

Yep Angelis,
But I don't trust the accuracy of that site (it seems to think that Afilias (the .info registry) is an Irish hosting company) and this would provide provide a better view of the UK web business as in each website would be checked to see it exists rather than just giving the number of domains/websites mapping to a particular IP.

Regards...jmcc

[Angelis]

Says its in North Carolina on mine...

[jmccormac]

The problem of associating a website with its correct country is one that search engines run across every day. I don't think that Google/Yahoo/Microsoft have solved that problem. They rely primarily on IP and ccTLD to determine what pages should be in the "pages from $country" search. This means that a lot of any particular country's sites hosted in com/net/org/biz/info hosted outside that country's IP ranges will be excluded. I've been testing a new "Ghosthunter" algorithm that solves this problem for one of my own search engines. It picked up approximately 1100 Irish com/net/org/biz/info websites hosted/hidden on big US and UK hosters in the first few minutes of operation.

In real terms, anything from 5% to 90% of a country's websites could be hosted outside that country's webspace. The UK, having a more advanced communications infrastructure would probably have a 5% or lower externally hosted sites figure. Considering that the UK has at least 2 million com/net/org/biz/info domains and 4.22 Million .uk domains, that ~5% is a lot of missing websites.

Regards...jmcc

[sullen]

Not that I know of. If Angelis is thinking of the site I'm thinking of that site doesn't seem to work properly for .co.uks either.

I'd say a lot more than 5% of UK sites are hosted abroad though: until recently bandwidth costs in the UK were absolutely horrendous.

[jmccormac]

What I've noticed from analysing the Irish web hosting industry stats is that the smaller hosters and web developers will host their clients on servers in the US. Most of them don't have enough domains to warrant their own DNS so they are typically on big US hosters. At the moment, I've around 100203 Irish domains/sites in the db here but at a guess, there is at least 30K more Irish sites out there. Web hosting in Ireland was very expensive until recently.

Traditional hosters such as the ISPs held the bulk of Irish sites. But over the last two years, these early market hosters have dropped considerably. They now only host about 25% of the market. The second generation Irish hosters account for most of the rest. In real terms, 22 of these HSPs handle about 51% of Irish domains/sites.

The UK is different in that the .uk cctld is more vibrant and cheaper than a .ie cctld. The cost and paperwork of getting a .ie has kept the numbers of .ie domains below 49K. It is also a far bigger market than the Irish one. Mapping .uk will be difficult but not impossible.

Regards...jmcc