HostingBrain / markets

European hosting market share, by country

Who effectively owns each market, what hosting really costs there, what businesses run, email posture and the words buyers actually type — one page per market, aggregate-level and reproducible through the connector. Snapshot 2026-09-13; price snapshot 2026-09-14.

Hosting concentration is national, not continental: measured Europe-wide the market looks fragmented, yet several countries run on only a handful of effective owners of the customer relationship. Across these thirteen markets, about 5.4 to 25.5 effective hosting infrastructures collapse to about 3.1 to 23.1 effective owners — a gap of up to 2.9× that no storefront shows — though in Spain it runs the other way, with the customer book spread across more owners than infrastructures. Each page states which concentration question every number answers, and the words local buyers actually type.

Norway — .no Norwegian businesses can pick between about 9 hosting infrastructures and about 3.1 owners of the customer relationship. That gap — not the storefront count — is the Norwegian hosting market. hosting-relationship HHI 3,269 · ~3.1 effective owners vs ~9 infrastructures · 384,906 live business domains · entry from €2.89/mo · buyers search webhotell Denmark — .dk In Denmark, the renewal is the typical customer's real price. hosting-relationship HHI 2,585 · ~3.9 effective owners vs ~5.4 infrastructures · 494,005 live business domains · entry from €3.88/mo · buyers search webhotel France — .fr Few owners, a contested front door: about 4.9 effective owners hold the French customer book, while at least 3 ownership groups fight for page one and the largest platforms price below the storefront median. hosting-relationship HHI 2,040 · ~4.9 effective owners vs ~6.3 infrastructures · 1,983,630 live business domains · entry from €1.86/mo · buyers search hébergement Sweden — .se Ownership roughly halves effective competition in Sweden: about 10.5 hosting infrastructures serve the market, but only about 5.2 owners hold the customer relationships behind them. hosting-relationship HHI 1,912 · ~5.2 effective owners vs ~10.5 infrastructures · 651,923 live business domains · entry from €2.58/mo · buyers search webbhotell Italy — .it Italy runs the most commerce-heavy web estate we publish — e-commerce tooling on 37.4% of the sites we fingerprint — and the least enforced email behind it: 1.9% of mail-carrying Italian domains reject forged mail. hosting-relationship HHI 1,659 · ~6 effective owners vs ~7.1 infrastructures · 1,498,473 live business domains · entry from €0.82/mo · buyers search hosting United Kingdom — .uk Hosting in Britain has become a platform market: website-builder software is detected on 17.3% of measured sites, and counting the whole control plane makes the market look 1.4× more plural than its hosting competition actually is. hosting-relationship HHI 1,767 · ~5.7 effective owners vs ~7.4 infrastructures · 3,493,082 live business domains · pricing coverage 17.4% — no market price stated · buyers search web hosting Germany — .de A scale market, not a monopoly market: 5.0 million live business domains and about 7.5 effective owners — contested at €0.84/mo to win the customer, then re-priced 6.5× at renewal. hosting-relationship HHI 1,326 · ~7.5 effective owners vs ~13.1 infrastructures · 5,026,637 live business domains · entry from €0.84/mo · buyers search webhosting Czechia — .cz The Czech price is a first-year price: at least 5 of the 8 tracked storefronts advertise an introductory rate — a floor, since the ones that never show a renewal cannot be counted either way — and storefronts serving 41.2% of captured relationships say what happens after it. hosting-relationship HHI 1,023 · ~9.8 effective owners vs ~15.4 infrastructures · 664,564 live business domains · entry from €2.02/mo · buyers search webhosting Poland — .pl The €0.75 acquisition market: 11 of the 12 tracked Polish storefronts run teaser pricing, in a market open enough to hold about 12.5 effective owners. hosting-relationship HHI 802 · ~12.5 effective owners vs ~16.9 infrastructures · 1,030,064 live business domains · entry from €0.75/mo · buyers search hosting Finland — .fi Finland is fragmented where it counts and thin where we can measure: about 12.2 effective owners of the customer relationship, and 9 tracked storefronts describing 40.1% of them. hosting-relationship HHI 819 · ~12.2 effective owners vs ~14.4 infrastructures · 311,306 live business domains · entry from €3.50/mo · buyers search webhotelli Switzerland — .ch Fragmentation has not made Switzerland cheap. About 15.5 effective owners hold the Swiss customer book, and the average customer still enters at €11.54/mo — the highest we publish, and several times the median of the markets on this site. hosting-relationship HHI 644 · ~15.5 effective owners vs ~13.9 infrastructures · 1,086,990 live business domains · entry from €11.54/mo · no national search vocabulary published Spain — .es Spain does not hide the repricing — it publishes it. 96.7% of captured relationships can see their renewal price before they commit, and the median measured cliff is still 4.5×. hosting-relationship HHI 497 · ~20.1 effective owners vs ~16.7 infrastructures · 758,720 live business domains · entry from €1.49/mo · buyers search alojamiento Netherlands — .nl The most open market we publish — about 23.1 effective owners for 2.3 million live Dutch business domains — and still one where 87% of tracked storefronts acquire on teaser pricing. hosting-relationship HHI 432 · ~23.1 effective owners vs ~25.5 infrastructures · 2,290,477 live business domains · entry from €1.95/mo · buyers search webhosting

Every figure is queryable on the free tier via market_concentration, market_digitization, technology_adoption, market_pricing and email_security. Named provider shares, per-operator price ladders and the quarterly named operator ranking live in the product.

Reading across the set rather than one market at a time: European web hosting statistics collects the same concentration readings beside domain populations, website technology, email posture and the consolidation record.

How to read these pages

Every market page states its own numbers and its own caveats. The definitions behind them are the same everywhere, so they live here once rather than at the foot of all thirteen.

Populations and denominators

The denominator is the active-domains book on each national ccTLD — domains that resolve and carry verified activity (operating email, live web content or managed-platform provisioning), with parking and dead pages excluded. It is a domain count, not a website count: a domain qualifies on operating email alone. It is deliberately smaller than a registry total, and it is a floor that rises as measurement progresses, so it is never a count of "all domains in the country". Technology figures use a further subset: the sites whose pages we measure and fingerprint. Email figures use mail-carrying domains. Each page names which denominator each number sits on — they are not interchangeable.

Concentration, and the three questions it answers

HHI is the sum of squared percent market shares, running 0–10,000; 1,500 and 2,500 are the conventional moderate and high thresholds. Effective competitors = 10,000 / HHI: how many equal-sized players would produce the observed concentration.

"How concentrated is this market" is really three questions with three answers, and mixing them is a category error:

The gap between them is itself the finding: customers can meet many brands and many infrastructures while the economic relationship behind them has already concentrated. All readings are ownership-folded via the validated acquisition ledger plus nameserver brand mapping, which makes every concentration figure a lower bound — owners that are unledgered, or hidden behind misconfigured nameservers, are missed, so true concentration is at least as high as stated. The three readings do not share one base: each is renormalised over its own actor set, so a share from one reading must never be quoted against another.

Technology detection

Adoption reads HTML and CNAME fingerprints: it measures presence, not billing. The website-builder share is a floor — the catalog catches some hoster-native editors via generator tags, but native builders that emit no markup fingerprint are undercounted, so a low builder number can mean "built local", not "less digital". Detection differences are also why builder shares should not be compared across markets without that caveat attached.

Pricing

Prices come from weekly storefront captures taken from verified in-country vantage points, shared-hosting category only, normalised to ex-VAT monthly EUR at ECB FX. The tracked set is a coverage subset, not a census, so each page states what share of its market's customer relationships the tracked storefronts represent. Medians are suppressed below five priced operators, and a renewal cliff is stated only where five or more operators publish a measurable renewal ladder — a median over three storefronts is an anecdote, not a statistic. Teaser share is a floor: storefronts whose renewal price is never disclosed sit in the denominator. Renewal cliffs are read at three grains — the measured median over storefronts that publish a renewal, a structure-adjusted median at one vote per storefront, and a customer-weighted median — because flat-displaying storefronts are often numerous but small: a storefront-grain figure is a merchandising statistic, not the customer picture. Renewal visibility is reported as three shares of a market's captured customer relationships, never two: storefronts whose second-year price we can read against their first-year price, storefronts that publish a second-year price we are still holding — stated on their page, but on a basis we cannot yet line up, so it is re-read before we compare it — and the rest, which publish no second-year price at all. The middle share is printed on a market page whenever it is anything other than zero, because a measurement gap of ours is not a finding about a storefront.

Prices carry their own date. Storefront captures are re-priced far more often than the market book behind the rest of a market page is rebuilt, so the two would be stated under one date only by accident. Every price figure we publish is dated to the price capture it came from — the price snapshot beside it — and a page's headline snapshot date covers concentration, market size, technology and email, never pricing.

Email posture

SPF and DMARC shares are of each market's mail-carrying business domains. Adoption is not enforcement: only a hard-fail SPF policy and DMARC p=reject actually reject forged mail, while p=none is monitoring only. The gap between publishing a record and rejecting forged mail is where the risk lives.

Search vocabulary

Each market's word cloud is the vocabulary local hosting providers put in their own page titles and headings, measured from live storefronts, one vote per provider. Term size encodes how many providers use a term; the counts themselves are not printed. It is evidence of what providers optimise for, which is not the same as search volume.

What these pages do not claim

Everything here is aggregate-level. Named provider shares, per-operator price ladders and the quarterly named operator ranking are the product, not the public page. Percentages are of the stated denominator and of the stated snapshot date — not of a registry, and not of a complete customer book.