Switzerland is an open market that charges like a closed one. On the confirmed-active .ch business book, hosting-relationship concentration — hosting competitors only, with CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS-infrastructure actors excluded — is an HHI of just 637: about 15.7 effective owners of the customer relationship, and no actor holds more than 16.0% of it. That openness has produced neither low prices nor visible terms — the 8 storefronts we track publish a renewal price for only 10.7% of captured relationships, the least of any market on this site. Where Switzerland does lead is enforcement: 33.6% of its mail-carrying domains publish a DMARC policy that acts on forged mail rather than merely watching it.
“Concentration” is three different questions, and they have three different answers. Hosting-relationship HHI (637) measures economic market power — who owns the customer relationship — counting hosting competitors only. Hosting-infrastructure HHI (719) measures where the workloads actually run. Control-plane HHI (534) measures the combined ecosystem, and deliberately includes CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS-infrastructure actors alongside hosting groups.
Read as market power, Switzerland runs on about 15.7 effective owners of the customer relationship; read as infrastructure, the same book spreads across about 13.9 effective hosting infrastructures — almost no gap at all (0.9×): counting owners instead of infrastructures barely changes this market. The share readings do not line up the same way: the top three owners hold 34.6% of customer relationships, while the top three infrastructures carry 36.8% of the workloads, and on the wider control plane — which also counts CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS actors — the top three come to 29.4%.
Price and transparency do not follow the number of competitors here. Swiss buyers meet the highest entry price we publish — €11.73/mo weighted, against a €8.53 storefront median — in a market with about 15.7 effective owners, and storefronts covering just 10.7% of captured relationships state what the second year costs. We do not know why Switzerland prices where it does; we do know that concentration is not the explanation.
All three readings are drawn from the confirmed-active .ch business book (1,032,648 classified domains) and are ownership-folded — a lower bound. Each reading is renormalised over its own actor set. How the bands and the three readings work.
Across the 269,634 confirmed-active Swiss business sites we HTTP-enrich and fingerprint: 25.6% carry e-commerce tooling, 37.4% run analytics, and 11.6% sit on a detected website builder. Off the web layer, 14.8% of the full book runs modern hosted email.
Presence, not billing; the builder share is a floor. How technology detection works.
Of the 964,048 mail-carrying business domains, 90.4% publish SPF but only 40.3% do so with a spoof-rejecting hard fail. 50.4% publish DMARC — 14.5% with an enforcing p=reject, 16.8% monitoring-only p=none, both shares of the same mail-carrying book, so enforcement reaches 33.6% of it. Adoption is not enforcement. How to read email posture.
Across 8 tracked Swiss storefronts, the median entry-tier price is €8.53/mo ex-VAT. Weight the same storefronts by how many businesses each platform actually serves and the price the average Swiss customer meets is €11.73/mo — above the storefront median — the biggest platforms here price above the field.
— a floor, since storefronts that never disclose a renewal price sit in the denominator.
Fewer than five tracked Swiss storefronts publish a measurable renewal price, so we do not state a measured market renewal cliff — a median over three storefronts would be an anecdote, not a statistic. Storefronts serving only 10.7% of captured Swiss customer relationships publish a renewal price — most Swiss customers genuinely cannot see year two before they commit.
The tracked set represents 54.0% of the Swiss control-plane customer relationships. How prices are captured, normalised and suppressed.
Switzerland buys hosting in German, French and Italian, and every Swiss storefront we capture today sells in German. A single national word list built from those pages would describe one language region while reading as the whole country, so this page publishes none. What we can say is what the Swiss storefronts we do capture optimise for, and that is not the same thing as a national vocabulary — so it waits until the captured set covers every buying language in the market.
How the vocabulary is measured, and on what evidence: the shared method note.
Every figure here is queryable through the HostingBrain connector, free tier. In Claude or any MCP-compatible assistant, this is the whole page in one prompt:
“Using HostingBrain, describe the Switzerland hosting market: how concentrated is it — give me the actor-pure hosting-relationship HHI and effective owners for market power, and the hosting-infrastructure and control-plane readings beside it, ownership-folded — how large is the confirmed-active business book, what do businesses run (CMS / e-commerce / builder adoption), what does entry shared hosting cost and how steep are renewal cliffs, and what is the SPF/DMARC posture? Keep it aggregate-level.”
Ask the follow-up yourself. HostingBrain answers questions like this — with the date, denominator and caveats attached — inside Claude and any MCP-compatible assistant. Named provider shares and per-operator price ladders are on Pro.