Spain is an open market that runs on disclosed repricing. On the confirmed-active .es business book, hosting-relationship concentration — hosting competitors only, with CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS-infrastructure actors excluded — is an HHI of just 450, about 22.2 effective owners of the customer relationship. The interesting number here is not who owns the market but what the market openly charges in year two. The words buyers type are alojamiento and hosting.
“Concentration” is three different questions, and they have three different answers. Hosting-relationship HHI (450) measures economic market power — who owns the customer relationship — counting hosting competitors only. Hosting-infrastructure HHI (561) measures where the workloads actually run. Control-plane HHI (440) measures the combined ecosystem, and deliberately includes CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS-infrastructure actors alongside hosting groups. For a market-power reading — who can raise prices — the first is the one that counts, and it is the number this page leads with.
Read as market power, Spain runs on about 22.2 effective owners of the customer relationship; read as infrastructure, the same book spreads across about 17.8 effective hosting infrastructures — the reverse of the usual gap: at 0.8× the customer book is spread across MORE owners than there are infrastructures, the signature of many small brands reselling on a smaller number of platforms. The share readings sit close together here: the top three owners hold 28.3% of customer relationships, while the top three infrastructures carry 32.0% 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%. Three denominators, three numbers; quoting one against another is the error these pages are built to avoid.
Teaser pricing is not a trick in Spain, it is the published model: 93% of tracked storefronts acquire on it, and storefronts serving 97.4% of captured relationships state the renewal price on the page — the highest disclosure weight of the markets we publish. Buyers are told about the 4.5× step up; the open question is how many read it.
All three readings are drawn from the confirmed-active .es business book (684,823 classified domains) and are ownership-folded, which makes them a lower bound. They do not share one base: only the control-plane reading is measured on that full figure, while the infrastructure and relationship readings are each renormalised over their own actor set, so their shares must never be read against it. How the bands and the three readings work.
Across the 190,308 confirmed-active Spanish business sites we HTTP-enrich and fingerprint: 34.1% carry e-commerce tooling, 52.8% run analytics, and 2.3% sit on a detected website builder. Off the web layer, 10.3% of the full book runs modern hosted email.
Presence, not billing; the builder share is a floor. How technology detection works.
Of the 641,224 mail-carrying business domains, 92.8% publish SPF but only 24.9% do so with a spoof-rejecting hard fail; 57.7% publish DMARC, of which 3.6% enforce with p=reject and 40.1% publish monitoring-only p=none. Adoption is not enforcement — the gap between publishing a record and actually rejecting forged mail is where the risk lives.
Across 15 tracked Spanish storefronts, the median entry-tier price is €1.95/mo ex-VAT. Weight the same storefronts by how many businesses each platform actually serves and the price the average Spanish customer meets is €1.49/mo — below the storefront median — the biggest platforms here price below the field.
— a floor, since storefronts that never disclose a renewal price sit in the denominator.
The median measured renewal cliff in Spain is 4.5× — the typical teaser storefront re-prices 4.5-fold at the first renewal — and the steepest measured cliff in the market is 26.3×. Renewal visibility is better than the storefront count suggests: storefronts serving 97.4% of captured Spanish customer relationships publish their renewal price on the page. Every hosting anniversary is a repricing event; which operator runs the steepest ladder, and every rung of it, lives in the product. At storefront grain — one vote per storefront, the 1 that display one plain recurring price with no teaser mechanics counted at face value (1.0×) — the structure-adjusted median is 4.3× across 11 storefronts. That is a merchandising statistic, not the customer picture: flat-displaying storefronts are often numerous but small.
The tracked set represents 47.7% of Spain's control-plane customer relationships. How prices are captured, normalised and suppressed.
Spanish businesses search both alojamiento and the English hosting, and the storefronts sell on the same two words plus the qualities beside them — rápido, seguro, profesional.
Measured from Spanish storefronts, sized by how many providers use each term.
The two terms buyers search most: alojamiento / hosting. How this is measured.
Every figure here is queryable through the HostingBrain connector. In Claude or any MCP-compatible assistant, this is the whole page in one prompt:
“Using HostingBrain, describe the Spain 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.”
Resolves to market_concentration, market_digitization,
technology_adoption, market_pricing and
email_security (all free tier). See definitions('hhi').
Reproduce this analysis: market_concentration,
market_digitization, technology_adoption, market_pricing and
email_security return every figure above for Spain and every other European market — on
the free tier. Named provider shares and price ladders: market_structure,
pricing_profile (Pro).
Ask the follow-up yourself. HostingBrain answers questions like this — with the date, denominator and caveats attached — inside Claude and any MCP-compatible assistant.