How to read the market
Coverage is a spectrum, and every number states which end it sits on. The three headline tiers, from ceiling to floor:
A domain-level classification — not a count of companies, customers or legal entities. Every count names the population it was measured on.
2026-09-13 - the web-provisioned tier is corrected down, from about 370 million to about 325 million. This is a correction to our own counting, not movement in the market. For eleven weeks the population admitted names that sit under somebody else's domain - a customer's own address on a big platform's domain - and counted each one as a domain in its own right. It is not one. The unit we count is the registrable domain, the name a company actually buys and owns, bounded by the public list the industry uses to draw that line, and that is the same rule we already use to decide which operator a name belongs to. Those names have been removed. The web-active and active-domains tiers move down with the ceiling; per-country and per-operator readings barely move, because the removed names sat in a handful of shared namespaces rather than across national markets. A second, smaller correction of the same kind is still to come - on the order of ten million names in one national namespace - and it will be dated here when it lands.
The published figures these definitions produce — market share and concentration by country, website technology and email-authentication adoption, and the consolidation record — are collected on European web hosting statistics, each with the population it was measured on and the date it was observed.
| Population or layer | Definition |
|---|---|
| Web-provisioned universe | Domains observed configured to serve the web at least once. A broad ceiling, not a count of current hosting customers. |
| Web-active series | Domains meeting the current published activity definition. When the definition changes materially we date the change and mark affected numbers as not comparable to earlier ones — the current definition took effect 2026-07-18 and is not comparable to earlier published values. |
| active-domains book | A stricter observed floor: verified operating email, live content or platform provisioning; parking, registrar placeholders and dead pages excluded under the published rule set. |
| Control plane | The nameserver operator — the relationship and registrar/control-plane position. It is not automatically the host. |
| Hosting origin | The network observed serving the site. Cloud and CDN masking can prevent brand attribution, and that limit is stated where it applies. |
| Web platform | A detected third-party platform or builder at the front door. A subset, not the entire web market. |
| The provider carrying mail for domains that publish an operating mail configuration. |
Public signals, reconciled across layers
HostingBrain uses publicly observable DNS, HTTP, TLS, website technology, pricing and company-ownership information. It normalises operators and brands, resolves current owners, defines analytical populations and carries coverage limitations into the answer.
Source categories
DNS and nameserver configuration · HTTP, TLS and publicly served website signals · website technology and platform fingerprints · public storefront pricing and promotional terms · public company, sponsor and acquisition records · registry and market calibration sources where available.
How a number is built
Five signal layers — registration, DNS control plane, web serving, platform provisioning, ownership — and never a host attribution from one signal alone. Observe → classify → attribute → calibrate → answer, with as-of date, denominator, attribution layer, confidence and caveats on every answer.
What HostingBrain does not claim
- A domain is not automatically a customer or a unique company.
- Nameserver control is not automatically website hosting.
- An observed technology is not automatically a paid subscription.
- Directional provider movement is not calibrated customer churn.
- Origin attribution can undercount cloud-hosted or CDN-masked operators — stated as a caveat, never mistaken for a small hosting business.
- A active domains count is a defined observed floor, not a registry total.
When we don't know, the answer says so.
How confident each answer is
Every answer states how strongly the public evidence supports it, and thin coverage downgrades the answer rather than hiding behind it.
| Evidence strength | What it means |
|---|---|
| Directly observed | The signal is measured on the domain itself — DNS and nameserver configuration, HTTP and TLS responses, or a published storefront price. |
| Corroborated | Several independent signals agree — for example a certificate, a shared tracking identifier and the serving network all point to the same operator. |
| Inferred | A single signal supports a likely but unconfirmed reading. It is labelled as an inference, never presented as a measurement. |
| Insufficient | Coverage is too thin to answer precisely. The answer is returned as direction-only, or the field is withheld. |
Every answer belongs to a release
The website and product read from one versioned, immutable snapshot: the numbers on this site, the answers in the product and the definitions behind them trace to the same snapshot. When a definition changes materially, HostingBrain dates the change and marks the affected numbers as not comparable to earlier ones, rather than presenting the change as market movement.
| Field | Where you see it |
|---|---|
| Data version | This page, the changelog and answer details - currently 2026-09-13. |
| As-of date | On every product example and result - currently 2026-09-13. |
| Update frequency | The published dataset refreshes weekly. Every answer carries the snapshot date it was computed from, so you always know how fresh a number is. |
| Definition version | Population definitions carry a date; material changes are noted in the release notes. |
| Coverage | Shown where it changes interpretation, not buried in a global disclaimer. |
| Warnings | Clear states: insufficient coverage direction-only field withheld definition changed |
| Changelog | Plain-English release notes for data additions, fixes and definition changes. |
Corrections and withheld values
When we find a number wrong, we correct it at the source and date the correction in the changelog — we restate rather than quietly patch. Materially invalid fields are withheld rather than returned with a cosmetic footnote, and a figure that is no longer comparable to earlier ones is held back, not caveated. Definition changes carry a release note and never masquerade as market movement. Evidence stays inspectable throughout: answers retain the as-of date, coverage, caveat and supporting source.
Public-source intelligence, with clear boundaries
HostingBrain is built from publicly observable technical and commercial information. It does not use private customer billing databases, credentialed access, leaked data or intrusive scanning, and it does not append personal contact, consumer-profile or private customer data. Research confidentiality: your query subjects are never visible to other customers and never sold.