Every hosting investor asks some version of the same question: are hyperscalers and edge platforms capturing the new websites? Installed market shares can't answer it — they average over a decade of old decisions. So we measured arrivals instead: every European domain that entered our web-active population over eight complete weeks — 1,975,920 new web-active domains across 17 European markets — against an installed base of 27,410,331, by hosting-front class.
The first cut looked dramatic. The second cut is the story — and it answers the two halves of the question differently.
Naive momentum reads are set by single events, not by markets. In Italy, 63.7% of the entire new-domain cohort sits behind one nameserver: read raw, the market's "momentum" is one operator's registration book. 4 of the 17 markets we measure trip the same screen.
That is not a hundred thousand Italian businesses making an infrastructure choice; it is one portfolio. The screen drops a flagged market entirely — from the arrivals and from the installed base it is compared against — so it changes the country mix on both sides, not just the headline. Here that widens the gap it is measuring: read raw, new European domains are CDN-fronted at 17.1% against 14.5% installed, a gap of under three points; screened, 18.2% against 12.9%, more than five. The five markets it removes carry an unusually edge-heavy installed base, so leaving them in flatters the comparison rather than inflating it.
Single operators move portfolios. Markets move slowly. If you don't screen bulk events, you will mistake one for the other.
With bulk events screened out (1,271,400 organic new domains against 19,700,017 installed), the distribution of new European websites across hosting-front classes moves in exactly one of the three classes:
Three mechanics distort naive "the cloud is taking the new sites" reads — and the third is why the edge tilt above is a smaller finding than it looks:
1. Placeholder pollution. Fresh domains disproportionately sit on registrar forwarding and placeholder infrastructure — which runs on major-cloud IPs. To an ASN-level read, a parked new domain looks like a cloud-hosted new website. Our web-active tier excludes placeholder and forwarding infrastructure by reverse-DNS fingerprint, so that inflation never enters these numbers.
2. Bulk events. One operator, one window, a hundred thousand domains — screened here, headline-making if not. They can push the number either way: in this cohort they pushed it down.
3. The masking bound, stated. For 18.2% of organic new sites the origin sits behind a CDN and is not visible — which is the same figure as the edge tilt itself, and that is the point. A rising CDN-front share does not say a site moved off traditional hosting; it says we stopped being able to see where it is served from. What sits behind the edge is a bound, not a guess: if every masked origin were a hyperscaler the picture would change, and history suggests it is a mix. We report what we can see, and how much we can't.
For operators: the feared leak of new customers to hyperscalers is still not visible in European arrival data — visible hyperscaler origins sit at 8.1% of arrivals against 7.9% of the installed base. What has grown is the edge in front, and an edge in front of a site is not a host behind it. The front door of new websites still opens on traditional hosting three times in four — the new-customer fight is still winnable at acquisition.
For investors and advisors: momentum claims — scary or rosy — need placeholder-clean, event-screened arrival data. A single-window, single-market read can show you a majority-of-cohort "surge" that is one portfolio changing nameservers. Screen first, conclude second.
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 new-site hosting momentum in Europe: among domains first seen in the last eight weeks, which hosting classes (CDN-fronted, hyperscaler, traditional) are over- or under-represented versus the installed base — with bulk events screened out.”
Resolves to hosting_momentum (free). See definitions('bulk_event_screening').
Reproduce this analysis: the hosting_momentum
tool returns every number above — global, Europe raw vs screened, and per-market with bulk-event flags —
and it is available on the free 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.