HostingBrain / markets / netherlands

Netherlands hosting market share: how concentrated it is, and what Dutch businesses run

HostingBrain market page · data snapshot 2026-09-06 · aggregate-level, no named providers

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 433, 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.

433
hosting-relationship HHI (unconcentrated) — hosting competitors only
23.1
effective owners of the customer relationship
28.4%
of customer relationships held by the top three owners — hosting competitors only, same actor base as the HHI
2,286,196
live business domains

Market share and concentration

“Concentration” is three different questions, and they have three different answers. Hosting-relationship HHI (433) 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.

Herfindahl–Hirschman Index — Netherlands active domains 1,500 2,500 infrastructure392control plane426market power433 moderate high

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 28.4% 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 28.8%.

Fragmentation is not the same as restraint. 88% of tracked Dutch storefronts acquire on teaser pricing and the median measured renewal cliff is 6.0× — 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 (1,798,918 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.

What Dutch businesses run: technology adoption statistics

Across the 821,166 active Dutch business sites whose pages we measure and fingerprint: 53.5% run a detectable CMS — the WordPress-led content web — 24.9% carry e-commerce tooling, 46.5% run analytics, and 4.2% sit on a detected website builder. Off the web layer, 16.9% of the full Dutch book runs modern hosted email.

Presence, not billing; the builder share is a floor. How technology detection works.

Email security posture

Of the 1,929,606 mail-carrying business domains, 87.1% publish SPF but only 30.2% do so with a spoof-rejecting hard fail. 65.1% publish DMARC — 14.2% with an enforcing p=reject, 39.6% monitoring-only p=none, both shares of the same mail-carrying book, so enforcement reaches 25.5% of it. Adoption is not enforcement. How to read email posture.

What hosting costs in the Netherlands

Across 16 tracked Dutch storefronts, the median entry-tier price is €1.77/mo ex-VAT. Weight the same storefronts by how many businesses each platform actually serves and the price the average Dutch customer meets is €1.99/mo — above the storefront median: among the storefronts we price, which together hold 21% of this market's hosting relationships, the larger platforms price above the field.

At least 14 of the 16 tracked storefronts (88%) acquire on teaser pricing — a floor, since storefronts that never disclose a renewal price sit in the denominator.

The median measured renewal cliff in the Netherlands is — the typical teaser storefront re-prices 6-fold at the first renewal — and the steepest measured cliff in the market is 30.3×. Renewal visibility is better than the storefront count suggests: among the storefronts we price, which hold 21% of this market's hosting relationships, those serving 93.3% of captured Dutch customer relationships publish their renewal price on the page. Per-operator price ladders are in the product.

The tracked set represents 43.5% of the Dutch control-plane customer relationships. Price snapshot 2026-08-31; prices are captured on their own cadence. How prices are captured, normalised and suppressed.

What this market searches

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.

hosting website webhosting betrouwbare managed nederland snelle pakket service domeinnaam wordpress veilig cloud provider

Measured from Dutch storefronts, sized by how many providers use each term. The two terms buyers search most: webhosting / hosting. How this is measured.

Data scope for the Netherlands. Snapshot 2026-09-06 — pricing is dated separately, below. Concentration and market size are on the .nl active-domains book (1,798,918 active domains). Technology shares are on the 821,166 sites whose pages we measure and fingerprint. Email shares are of the 1,929,606 mail-carrying domains. Pricing covers 16 tracked Dutch storefronts, representing 43.5% of this market's control-plane customer relationships, at price snapshot 2026-08-31. Aggregate-level only. Definitions, bounds and what these pages do not claim.

Reproduce this — or ask it yourself

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:

Prompt · paste into an MCP client with HostingBrain connected

“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.

Get free access

Share this pageShare on LinkedIn