HostingBrain / briefs

Analyst briefs

Short, data-grounded reads on European hosting and domain-market structure — with the denominator and caveats stated on every number. Most briefs are aggregate-level; the full named, provider-level detail behind them lives in the product.

The AI web is one company Across thirteen European markets, 8,928 of 5,450,090 business websites carry an AI website builder. Conventional hosted builders carry 383,818 — 43.0 times as many — and WordPress 2,981,684. Restrict the reading to the 1,680,015 re-read since 24 July and the share is 0.22%, the higher of the two. About six in seven of the AI-built sites are a single product — 85.5% at that scope, 92.6% on the wider answered base. August 2026 Buy first, integrate never Across nine European groups running a shared platform, 57 of 87 acquired brands have their customers served from a group platform. 23 do not, two or more years after the deal — 1,266,388 live domains, 21 of them with nothing moved at all. Every one of the seven owners carrying that residue announced further acquisitions afterwards. August 2026 Three buyers, half the software deals 75 of 262 validated acquisitions and mergers by 22 consolidator groups took a software or adjacent target — but three buyers made 38 of those 75. Of the 14 groups with a real deal history, three have bought no software at all, one of them 23 deals deep. The up-stack move is a strategy, not a sector condition, and a deal count is not cross-sell evidence. August 2026 Three ways to sell a domain GoDaddy is monetising the domain funnel (customers flat, ARPU +9%), IONOS pairs web presence with sovereign European cloud, and Europe's consolidators are buying software faster than many integrate their hosting — 19 of team.blue's 34 validated acquisitions are software. Measured integration spans 0.68 to 0.08: the hidden valuation variable. July 2026 Cheap first year. Then three times the price. Measured across 2,422 offers in 24 markets: 84.9% of offers stating both prices renew higher, the median shared-hosting cliff is 3.0×, and the norm is national — Denmark 4.4×, Czechia 2.4×. 32 of the 35 offers renewing at 8× or more sit on consolidator-owned storefronts. July 2026 Europe checks the mail. Nobody stops it. 82.0% of Europe's mail-carrying business domains publish SPF — but only 29.5% tell receivers to reject spoofed mail, and just 9.4% back it with a DMARC reject policy. The league table inverts when you measure enforcement: Italy publishes, Poland and Sweden enforce. Adoption is compliance; enforcement is protection. July 2026 Half the domains have no website Calibrated against 15 official European registries: only 49.5–78.7% of registered domains were ever provisioned to serve the web. Germany's registry is twice its web. Registered stock is not addressable market — and every TAM slide built on registry totals inherits the gap. July 2026 Whoever holds the domain, holds the customer Three findings combine into one thesis: traditional hosting holds new European sites, the provider relationship is far stickier than the server under it (serving moves without it 0.18%/yr), and multi-domain owners consolidate hard (74% single-provider). The prize is the control-plane relationship. July 2026 Hosting customers don't leave No single provider can measure faithfulness — it lives outside their book. Resolved across providers and borders: 74% of multi-domain owners keep everything with one provider, cross-border doesn't dent it, and exclusivity spans 80–50% — book quality, not size. July 2026 Who really owns Europe's hosting Read as market power — hosting competitors only — Norway is 3,205 and Denmark 2,572, both above the high-concentration line, against the Netherlands at 438. Consolidation is national, and the customer relationship concentrates well ahead of the infrastructure. July 2026 The server moves. The customer doesn't. Churn numbers are folklore: surveys or noisy migration feeds. Measured on 123M+ business domains: the provider relationship changes at ~15%/yr in Europe — and the serving layer moves without it at 0.18%/yr. The relationship is the atom of switching. July 2026 Where the new websites are going Are hyperscalers capturing Europe's new websites? Eight weeks of new-domain arrivals say no — visible hyperscaler origins are flat at 8.4% of arrivals. What does move is the CDN/edge front (18.1% screened), and one Italian nameserver alone holds 64.0% of that market's new cohort. Screen first, conclude second. July 2026 Nobody left hosting. They left the bundle. Hosting "churn" statistics are usually read as customers leaving. 123M+ active domains suggest something different: the customer stays, the wallet fragments — because front doors migrate quickly and trust migrates slowly. July 2026