Dutch fragmentation is real, and it survives the ownership test. On the .nl active-domains book, hosting-relationship concentration — hosting competitors only, with CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS-infrastructure actors excluded — is an HHI of just 432, solidly unconcentrated: about 23.1 effective owners of the customer relationship against about 25.5 effective infrastructures. The two readings almost agree here — a gap of just 1.1× — where Norway's ownership reading removes most of the field its infrastructure map suggests. The market word is webhosting.
“Concentration” is three different questions, and they have three different answers. Hosting-relationship HHI (432) measures economic market power — who owns the customer relationship — counting hosting competitors only. Hosting-infrastructure HHI (392) measures where the workloads actually run. Control-plane HHI (426) measures the combined ecosystem, and deliberately includes CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS-infrastructure actors alongside hosting groups.
Read as market power, the Netherlands runs on about 23.1 effective owners of the customer relationship; read as infrastructure, the same book spreads across about 25.5 effective hosting infrastructures — almost no gap at all (1.1×): counting owners instead of infrastructures barely changes this market. The share readings sit close together here: the top three owners hold 28.2% of customer relationships, while the top three infrastructures carry 23.8% of the workloads, and on the wider control plane — which also counts CDN, SaaS-builder and DNS actors — the top three come to 28.7%.
Fragmentation is not the same as restraint. 87% of tracked Dutch storefronts acquire on teaser pricing and the median measured renewal cliff is 5.5× — in the most open market here, promotion-led acquisition is still the default commercial model rather than a tactic of the weak.
All three readings are drawn from the .nl active-domains book (1,809,808 active 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 844,684 active Dutch business sites whose pages we measure and fingerprint: 24.9% carry e-commerce tooling, 46.4% run analytics, and 4.2% sit on a detected website builder. Off the web layer, 17.0% of the full Dutch book runs modern hosted email.
Presence, not billing; the builder share is a floor. How technology detection works.
Of the 1,935,699 mail-carrying business domains, 87.0% publish SPF but only 30.1% do so with a spoof-rejecting hard fail. 65.1% publish DMARC — 14.2% with an enforcing p=reject, 39.7% monitoring-only p=none, both shares of the same mail-carrying book, so enforcement reaches 25.4% of it. Adoption is not enforcement. How to read email posture.
Across 15 tracked Dutch storefronts, the median entry-tier price is €1.59/mo ex-VAT. Weight the same storefronts by how many businesses each platform actually serves and the price the average Dutch customer meets is €1.95/mo — above the storefront median: among the storefronts we price, which together hold 18% of this market's hosting relationships, the larger platforms price above the field.
— a floor, since storefronts that never disclose a renewal price sit in the denominator.
The median measured renewal cliff in the Netherlands is 5.5× — the typical teaser storefront re-prices 5.5-fold at the first renewal — and the steepest measured cliff in the market is 30.3×. Renewal visibility here is a measurement we are part of: storefronts serving 58.4% of captured Dutch customer relationships publish a renewal price we can read against the first-year price, and storefronts serving a further 33.9% publish one we cannot yet read that way — their price is stated on the page, and we are holding the comparison until we can re-read it on a consistent billing period. Together that is 92.3% of captured relationships whose storefront does state a second-year price; what we are not able to publish this week is what the average Dutch customer meets when it arrives. Per-operator price ladders are in the product.
The tracked set represents 43.2% of the Dutch control-plane customer relationships. Price snapshot 2026-09-14; prices are captured on their own cadence. How prices are captured, normalised and suppressed.
Dutch businesses search webhosting — written as one word, the way local providers spell it. It is the measured market term, and the .nl market is deep enough that ranking for it is a genuine contest, not a two-horse race.
Measured from Dutch storefronts, sized by how many providers use each term.
The two terms buyers search most: webhosting / hosting. How this is measured.
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 Netherlands 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 active-domains 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.