How concentrated is European hosting? Depends which country — and which layer — you measure.

The consolidation narrative says Europe's hosting market is being rolled up. Public trackers answer with a single global concentration score — around 500 on the HHI scale — and conclude the market is fragmented. Both are half-right, and the interesting structure lives exactly where a single number can't see it.

We computed the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index per European market, per attribution layer, on the confirmed-active business book — with ownership folded in: a consolidator's twelve local brands count as one owner, because they are one owner.

The continent is fragmented. Several countries are not.

Consolidation is national. Measured continent-wide, European hosting has ~36 effective competitors; measured in Oslo or Copenhagen, it has four or five.

Europe overall scores 276 — genuinely unconcentrated, dozens of effective competitors. But Norway (2,404), Denmark (2,102), France (1,818) and Sweden (1,605) sit in the moderate-to-high bands regulators use for merger scrutiny — while Germany (562) and the Netherlands (386) remain wide open. A single continental or global score averages Oslo's four-competitor market with Berlin's eighteen and calls the result "fragmented." Both facts are true; only the national one prices anything.

The layer gap: ownership concentrates before infrastructure does

Concentration also depends on what you fold. Our control-plane HHI counts a consolidator's brands as one owner. In Norway, ownership-folded control-plane concentration (2,404) runs well ahead of visible hosting-infrastructure concentration (1,411): the groups own the customer relationships of many brands that still serve from separate infrastructure. To a naive infrastructure read, the market looks moderately concentrated. To an ownership-aware read, it is nearly "high." Books concentrate silently — brands stay, balance sheets merge — which is why an acquisition ledger belongs in a concentration measure.

What this means

For investors: effective_n is the roll-up runway. A market at 4–5 effective competitors prices consolidation very differently from one at 16–18 — and the remaining independents in concentrated markets carry scarcity value. Both are queryable per market.

For operators: pricing power and consolidation pressure are properties of your national market, not of "European hosting." Strategy memos citing continental fragmentation are averaging away the market you actually compete in.