Hosting churn numbers are mostly folklore. Surveys ask providers what they believe. Raw "domain migration" feeds count tens of millions of moves a month. Neither tells you what an investor or an operator actually needs: how often do real businesses change each layer of their hosting stack?
So we measured it — every observed infrastructure transition on 123M+ active domains over 26 weeks, normalized, decomposed, and annualized.
The provider relationship is the atom of hosting switching: the serving layer moves without it at 0.18% a year — more than 80× less often than the relationship itself.
Read the ladder from the bottom. Businesses essentially never re-home where their site is served while keeping the same provider relationship — when infrastructure moves, the relationship moves, as one unit. Above it: providers shuffle IPs internally (3.84%/yr) more than twenty times as often as customers move serving — most IP-level "change" in the market is housekeeping, not churn. And at the top: the relationship itself changes for about one in seven European business domains a year — which means ~85% hold. Trust migrates slowly. Now it's measured.
Do not read 14.96% as a churn target. Switching is not total churn: domains are also lost to abandonment (1.8%/yr above) and to outright expiry, which sits on top of switching — so gross book attrition runs meaningfully higher. And the average hides mix: a business-dense ccTLD book should switch far less than a volume book, so the honest benchmark is your observed rate against your book's mix-adjusted expectation, not against the market average.
Public feeds report domain migrations in the tens of millions per month. Over the same 26 weeks, our raw log contains ~33M nameserver-change events — yet organic switching by European active-domains businesses amounts to ~1.6M domains (about 5.9M on the global book). The gap is not measurement error; it's composition:
1. Shard rotation isn't switching. Large cloud DNS services rotate nameserver shards; compared as raw strings, that alone fabricated ~30% extra "switches" before normalization.
2. Lifecycle isn't switching. A domain moving from registrar-default onto an operator is onboarding; a domain falling back to default or parking is abandonment. Both are business signals — neither is a customer choosing a new provider.
3. The aftermarket isn't a customer. Parked and drop-catch portfolios flip nameservers constantly — high event volume, near-zero commercial meaning (the same phenomenon that fabricated the "edge surge" in new-site data).
For operators: the relationship is your moat, and it holds at ~85%/yr — the leak is not mass defection but slow abandonment (1.8%/yr) plus the wallet fragmenting around a relationship that stays. Retention economics should price that asymmetry.
For investors and advisors: relationship-churn is measurable per book — survey churn and raw migration feeds will mislead a model in opposite directions (surveys overstate stickiness of the wallet; feeds overstate movement of the relationship). Book-level switching, tenure and flow detail is in the product.
Every figure here is queryable through the HostingBrain connector. In Claude or any MCP-compatible assistant, this is the whole brief in one prompt:
“Using HostingBrain, show how sticky European hosting is: the annualized rate at which active domains switch control-plane operator, decomposed into genuine operator switches versus activation, abandonment and aftermarket rotation — and explain why the switching rate is not a churn target.”
Resolves to layer_stickiness (free). See definitions('operator_switch').
Reproduce this analysis: the layer_stickiness
tool returns the full ladder — global and Europe, every metric above — and it is available on the free tier.
Named provider-level flows: migration_flows (analyst tier).
Ask the follow-up yourself. HostingBrain answers questions like this — with the date, denominator and caveats attached — inside Claude and any MCP-compatible assistant.