The web hit 1.47 billion websites in Netcraft’s September 2026 survey, and no single company hosts much of it. Shopify leads W3Techs’ November ranking with 5.4% of sites. The top seven hosts together hold barely a quarter.
These web hosting statistics are for bloggers, buyers and anyone sizing up the market. We also ran our own scan of 2,000 sites, and the biggest number it turned up is one most surveys can’t see.
Key web hosting statistics at a glance
Every figure here was checked on 13 November 2026 unless another date is given.
- Netcraft counted 1,470,435,351 websites on 323 million domains in September 2026, up 9.9% in a year.
- Those sites answer from only 15.5 million web-facing computers, about 95 sites per machine.
- The biggest hosting companies by share of websites are Shopify (5.4%), Hostinger (5.2%), Amazon (4.5%) and Wix (4.2%).
- Amazon’s data centers hold 11.8% of all websites, about twice Google’s 5.8%.
- Cloudflare’s server software answers for 33.8% of sites, ahead of Nginx (30.0%) and Apache (20.9%).
- One in three sites runs on a server in the United States (33.4%). Germany is second with 16.2%.
- WordPress runs 39.2% of all websites, and PHP powers 68.7% of the sites whose language is known.
- About a third of PHP sites still run PHP 7 or older, which no longer gets security fixes.
- Cloud infrastructure spending hit $168 billion in Q3 2026 alone, up 55% in a year.
- In our scan, 38.8% of a random 1,000 sites resolved to Cloudflare, which hides the real host.
How many websites are there in 2026?
Netcraft’s September 2026 survey got answers from 1,470,435,351 sites across 323,147,961 domains. A year earlier it counted 1,337,528,194 sites, so the web grew by about 133 million sites, or 9.9%.
Domains grew faster than sites, by 13.3%. That matters, because it means the growth isn’t only big platforms adding subdomains. New people and businesses are putting up new sites.
Don’t read 1.47 billion as 1.47 billion real businesses, though. Netcraft counts every hostname that answers a web request. Parked domains, test subdomains and auto-generated pages all count.
The more telling number is hardware. All those sites answered from 15,463,120 web-facing computers. That works out to roughly 95 sites per machine, which is what shared hosting looks like at planet scale. If you’re new to that idea, our guide to how web hosting works explains how one server holds hundreds of sites.
Which hosting companies host the most websites?
Shopify and Hostinger are neck and neck at the top, and nobody holds more than about 5% of the web. Here’s W3Techs’ ranking of web hosting providers by share of all websites it tracks:
| Hosting provider | Share of all websites | What it mainly sells |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | 5.4% | Online stores on its own platform |
| Hostinger | 5.2% | Shared, WordPress, VPS and cloud hosting |
| Amazon | 4.5% | Cloud infrastructure (AWS) |
| Wix | 4.2% | Website builder with hosting included |
| United Internet (IONOS) | 2.5% | Shared hosting, domains, servers |
| Squarespace | 2.5% | Website builder with hosting included |
| GoDaddy Group | 2.4% | Domains, shared and WordPress hosting |
Two things jump out.
First, three of the top seven aren’t hosting companies in the usual sense. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace sell website builders, and hosting comes bundled. Millions of shop owners have a host without ever choosing one.
Second, Hostinger is the largest company on the list that sells hosting as its main product. We moved 20 of our own sites there, and our Hostinger review covers what that switch was like.
Who owns the data centers behind websites?
Amazon does, by a wide margin. W3Techs ranks data center providers separately from hosting companies, and the order changes:
| Data center provider | Share of all websites |
|---|---|
| Amazon | 11.8% |
| 5.8% | |
| Hostinger | 5.2% |
| OVH | 2.7% |
| United Internet (IONOS) | 2.7% |
| Squarespace | 2.5% |
| Hetzner | 2.4% |
Why is Amazon at 4.5% as a host but 11.8% as a data center? Because plenty of companies you pay for hosting rent their servers from Amazon or Google. Your bill says one name, and the building your site lives in belongs to another.
This is the layer cake behind every hosting statistic. A single page can involve four companies, and each one tops a different chart. When two articles quote different leaders, check which layer each one is counting.
Cloud spending: AWS still leads, but Google is gaining
Spending tells a different story from website counts. Synergy Research Group says businesses spent $168 billion on cloud infrastructure services in Q3 2026, up 55% in a year. Most of that pays for AI and enterprise computing, not websites.
| Cloud provider | Q3 2026 share | Q3 2025 share |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | 26% | 29% |
| Microsoft Azure | 19% | 20% |
| Google Cloud | 16% | 13% |
AWS is still the biggest, but it lost three points in a year while Google gained three. For a small site owner, these numbers barely matter. They do explain why the big clouds keep cutting prices on small servers to win developers early.
Which web server software runs the most sites?
Cloudflare’s software answers for more sites than anything else, though usually as a front door rather than the real server. W3Techs’ numbers for sites whose web server it could identify:
| Web server | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare Server | 33.8% |
| Nginx | 30.0% |
| Apache | 20.9% |
| LiteSpeed | 13.4% |
| Node.js | 7.5% |
| Microsoft IIS | 2.9% |
| Caddy | 1.2% |
The shares add up to more than 100% because many sites use two, such as Cloudflare in front of Nginx. Cloudflare works as a reverse proxy: visitors talk to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare talks to the server that holds your files.
Netcraft, which counts every hostname rather than top sites, puts Cloudflare at 18.1%, nginx at 15.3% and Apache at 11.6% for September 2026. Same order, smaller numbers, because Netcraft’s huge count includes millions of parked and junk hostnames.
LiteSpeed’s 13.4% deserves a note. It’s far more common on budget shared hosting, where hosts like it for fast WordPress caching. If a cheap host advertises LiteSpeed, that’s a real feature, not filler.
Where are websites hosted? Server locations by country
The United States hosts a third of the web. W3Techs’ split of sites by the country their server sits in:
| Country | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| United States | 33.4% |
| Germany | 16.2% |
| Japan | 6.1% |
| France | 5.1% |
| Netherlands | 3.6% |
| Russia | 3.5% |
| United Kingdom | 2.6% |
One in three websites sits on a US server
Share of all websites, by the country their server is in.
- United States33.4%
- Germany16.2%
- Japan6.1%
- France5.1%
- Netherlands3.6%
- Russia3.5%
- United Kingdom2.6%
- Everywhere else29.5%
Source: W3Techs, 13 November 2026
Germany’s 16.2% surprises people. It’s home to big budget providers such as Hetzner, and to large data center hubs in Frankfurt, so plenty of non-German sites live there.
For your own site, distance still costs time. A reader in Mumbai loading a page from a US East Coast server waits on a long round trip, often around 200 ms, for every request a CDN can’t answer. Pick a data center near most of your readers, or put a CDN in front.
What software runs on web servers? Linux, PHP and WordPress
Linux and PHP still run most of the web. Here’s what W3Techs found on the server side:
| Technology | Share | What it’s a share of |
|---|---|---|
| Unix-like (mostly Linux) | 92.1% | Sites whose OS is known |
| Windows | 8.0% | Sites whose OS is known |
| PHP | 68.7% | Sites whose server language is known |
| WordPress | 39.2% | All websites (57.9% of sites with a CMS) |
| Shopify | 5.4% | All websites |
| Wix | 4.2% | All websites |
| No CMS detected | 32.3% | All websites |
WordPress alone runs nearly four in ten sites. That’s why hosts build whole product lines around it. Our managed vs shared WordPress hosting guide covers the first choice most WordPress owners face.
The PHP problem: a third of sites run unsupported versions
Among sites that use PHP, W3Techs finds 67.1% on PHP 8, 25.4% on PHP 7 and 7.5% on PHP 5. PHP 7 stopped getting security fixes at the end of 2022, and PHP 5 years before that.
PHP 7 and PHP 5 still run a third of PHP sites
Share of sites that use PHP, by major version.
- PHP 867.1%
- PHP 725.4%
- PHP 57.5%
Source: W3Techs, 13 November 2026
Data table
| Category | Share of PHP sites |
|---|---|
| PHP 8 | 67.1% |
| PHP 7 | 25.4% |
| PHP 5 | 7.5% |
So roughly one PHP site in three runs a version with known holes that will never be patched. Our own scan saw the same thing: of 44 sites that showed their PHP version, 14 ran PHP 7 or PHP 5. That’s a small sample, but it lines up.
Check yours today: In WordPress, open Tools, then Site Health, then Info, then Server. If it says 7.x, ask your host to switch you to PHP 8.3 or newer, after testing on a staging copy.
HTTPS, HTTP/3 and IPv6
Encryption is now the default. W3Techs finds 90.7% of sites load over HTTPS by default, and 64.4% of all sites use a free Let’s Encrypt certificate.
Newer protocols are catching up. HTTP/3 runs on 40.8% of sites and IPv6 on 32.5%. Our IPv4 vs IPv6 explainer covers why the second number has crawled for years.
Our scan: what 2,000 sites revealed about who hosts the web
Published surveys mostly count the top 10 million sites, so we checked two very different groups ourselves on 13 November 2026. We took the latest Tranco list, a research ranking of popular domains, and scanned:
- The top 1,000 domains, the giants such as Google, Amazon and Netflix.
- A random 1,000 from ranks 10,001 to 1,000,000, the ordinary sites: shops, blogs, agencies and local services.
For each one, we loaded the home page over HTTPS and read the headers. We then looked up which network owns the site’s IP address. Here’s what came back:
| What we measured | Top 1,000 | Random 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Answered over HTTPS | 729 | 804 |
| IP on Cloudflare’s network | 16.7% | 38.8% |
| IP on Amazon (AWS) | 23.8% | 12.0% |
| IP on Google | 9.6% | 2.2% |
| IP on Hetzner | 0.4% | 2.6% |
| Server header says Cloudflare | 23.0% | 44.8% |
| Server header hidden | 21.1% | 10.0% |
| Advertises HTTP/3 | 36.9% | 41.9% |
| Has an IPv6 (AAAA) record | 49.3% | 47.9% |
Three findings stood out.
Cloudflare hides the host for about 4 in 10 ordinary sites. When a site’s IP belongs to Cloudflare, nobody outside can tell whether the files sit on Hostinger, AWS or a box under someone’s desk. Every survey has to guess or skip those sites, which is the main reason hosting market shares disagree.
The giants run their own way. In the top 1,000, five networks (Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, Fastly and Akamai) held 63.7% of sites. A fifth of those big sites hide their server header entirely. Budget hosts barely appear: Hostinger and DigitalOcean showed up once each.
Ordinary sites lean on cheap, plain servers. Behind the random 1,000, Hetzner (24 sites) beat Google (20). Nginx (17.5%) and Apache (10.6%) were still the most common real servers we could see.
Our HTTP/3 figure of 41.9% landed within about a point of W3Techs’ 40.8%. That gives us some confidence the sample is fair. Our IPv6 number runs higher because we counted any AAAA record, while W3Techs measures sites that work over IPv6.
What we didn’t do: identify the host behind Cloudflare, or test speed and uptime. 271 top domains and 196 random ones didn’t answer a normal HTTPS request. Most were CDN, DNS and API domains with no home page, so they’re left out of the header numbers.
What these numbers mean when you pick a host
Statistics won’t choose a host for you, but three of them should change how you shop:
- Ignore “most popular” claims. With no host above about 5%, being big says little about your site. Compare support, renewal price and backups instead. Our checklist for choosing a web hosting service walks through them.
- Ask which PHP version you’ll get, and where the server is. A host that defaults to PHP 8.3 or newer and offers a data center near your readers is doing its job.
- Use a CDN, but know what it hides. Cloudflare’s free plan protects and speeds up a site, which is why it fronts so many. It doesn’t replace a decent host underneath.
Disclosure: we may earn a commission from the hosting links on this page, at no extra cost to you.
How we checked these numbers
We pulled every W3Techs figure from its live reports on 13 November 2026. W3Techs surveys the top 10 million sites and updates daily, so its numbers drift a little week to week. Netcraft figures come from its September 2026 web server survey, the latest at the time of writing. Cloud market shares are Synergy Research Group’s Q3 2026 estimates.
We left out market-size forecasts from paid research reports. They disagree with each other by tens of billions of dollars, and we couldn’t check their methods. The scan ran from our own Linux test machine using the Tranco list published on 12 November 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Where do web hosting statistics come from?
Mostly from crawlers. W3Techs and Netcraft visit millions of sites, read headers and look up who owns each IP address. Spending figures come from analysts such as Synergy Research Group, which estimate revenue. Host-published numbers, like customer counts, are self-reported and rarely checked by anyone.
How many websites are active?
Far fewer than the headline count. Netcraft’s 1.47 billion includes parked domains and auto-generated hostnames. Netcraft also tracks active sites, a far smaller group. Independent estimates built on its data put real, working sites at a few hundred million, not over a billion.
Is Hostinger the biggest web host?
It depends on the definition. By share of websites, Shopify edges it, 5.4% to 5.2%. Among companies whose main product is hosting you pick and pay for directly, Hostinger is the largest in W3Techs’ data. By revenue, the big cloud providers dwarf every traditional host.
Why do different sites quote different hosting market shares?
They count different things. Some count all hostnames, some only top sites, and some count the data center rather than the hosting brand. Cloudflare also hides the real host for a large slice of sites, so every survey handles those differently. Always check what a statistic is a share of.
How big is the web hosting market in dollars?
Paid research firms publish estimates, but they vary widely because each defines hosting differently, and some include cloud computing while others don’t. We haven’t quoted one because we couldn’t verify the methods. The firmest dollar figure is cloud infrastructure: $168 billion in Q3 2026.
Which country hosts the most websites?
The United States, with 33.4% of sites whose server location W3Techs could identify. Germany is a strong second at 16.2%, then Japan at 6.1%. France, the Netherlands, Russia and the UK follow, each with between 2.6% and 5.1%.
Do these web hosting statistics change often?
Shares shift slowly, a few tenths of a point a month, so a figure from this quarter is safe to quote. Counts of total websites jump around more: Netcraft’s total fell by 54 million in one month this year before rising again. Always date the number when you cite it.
The bottom line
The real story in these web hosting statistics is fragmentation. Shopify and Hostinger lead with about 5% each, and Amazon owns the most data center space. Cloudflare sits in front of so many sites that the true host is often invisible.
If you’re choosing a host, let none of that decide for you. Check the PHP version, the server location and the renewal price. If you’re citing these numbers, date them and say what each one measures, because that’s where most hosting statistics go wrong.
