Where the Web Is Concentrated — and Where It Isn’t
Web hosting is one of the most competitive markets on the internet — no provider holds more than 5.3% of websites. The layers underneath it are not. This page measures concentration at six levels of the stack, from the host you choose to the certificate authority you never think about.
On this page
The concentration gradient
Concentration on the web is usually discussed as a single number. It isn’t one. It varies enormously by layer, and it runs in the opposite direction to what most people assume — the part you choose is competitive, and the parts you don’t choose are not.
The practical consequence: changing web host is a real choice with hundreds of viable options, and it frequently does not change what your site actually depends on. Two hosts competing for your business can sit in the same data centre, behind the same reverse proxy, using certificates from the same authority. Diversity at the layer you shop for does not imply diversity in the layers beneath it.
Cite this analysis
https://www.paidhosting.com/infrastructure-concentration/
Findings and charts on this page may be reproduced with attribution and a link to this page. Press and data enquiries: [email protected]
Concentration at a glance
Web hosting providers: the competitive layer
This is the layer site owners actually shop for, and it is genuinely fragmented. The largest provider by number of websites is Shopify at 5.3%, followed by Hostinger at 5.0% and Amazon at 4.5%. No provider comes close to a dominant position, and the ten largest combined account for roughly a third of all websites.
Web hosting providers by share of all websites
W3Techs groups brands owned by the same entity, so figures reflect corporate ownership rather than trading names.
Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026. Bar lengths are scaled to the largest value shown, not to 100% of the market.
Chart may be reproduced with attribution to paidhosting.com- The ten largest web hosting providers together account for approximately 34% of all websites.Source: Paid Hosting calculation from W3Techs data, 10 August 2026. W3Techs publishes shares to one decimal place, so a sum of the ten reported values carries a rounding tolerance of roughly ±0.5 points; we state this figure to the nearest whole percent for that reason.
- Hetzner (2.2%), SiteGround (2.0%), Vercel (1.8%), Google (1.6%) and DigitalOcean (1.5%) follow the top ten.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
- W3Techs recorded Hostinger overtaking Amazon in the hosting rankings in February 2026, moving it into second place behind Shopify.Source: W3Techs, 10 February 2026
- More than 500 distinct hosting providers are individually tracked, the majority holding less than 0.1% of websites each.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
Shopify, Wix and Squarespace appear at the top of the hosting table because W3Techs classifies the provider that serves a website, not the type of product sold. A Shopify store is hosted by Shopify. This inflates platform businesses relative to conventional hosting companies, and it is the main reason this table looks different from hosting market share figures based on revenue or on number of customer accounts.
Data centre providers: where the fragmentation stops
One layer down, the picture changes. Hosting companies do not all own their infrastructure — many resell capacity from a much smaller set of data centre operators. At this layer Amazon holds 11.1% of all websites and Google 8.8%, meaning roughly one in five websites sits inside just two companies’ facilities.
Data centre providers by share of all websites
The provider supplying hardware and network infrastructure, which may differ from the hosting company the site owner contracts with.
Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026. Bar lengths are scaled to the largest value shown.
Chart may be reproduced with attribution to paidhosting.com- Amazon and Google together account for 19.9% of all websites at the data centre layer, compared with 6.1% at the hosting layer — the same two companies more than triple their share one layer down.Source: Paid Hosting calculation from W3Techs data, 10 August 2026
- Amazon’s share roughly doubles between the hosting layer (4.5%) and the data centre layer (11.1%), reflecting hosting companies that resell AWS capacity.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
- Oracle (1.4%), XServer (1.4%), Newfold Digital (1.3%), GMO Internet (1.3%) and Microsoft (1.0%) make up the next tier.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
Reverse proxies and CDNs: the most concentrated layer on the web
This is where concentration becomes extreme. Most websites — 71.1% — use no reverse proxy at all. But among those that do, Cloudflare holds 84.1% of the market. Expressed against the whole web rather than the proxy market, Cloudflare sits in front of 24.3% of all websites, roughly one site in four.
Reverse proxy market share
Share of the reverse proxy market among websites that use one. 71.1% of websites use none of the services tracked.
Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026.
Chart may be reproduced with attribution to paidhosting.comCloudflare’s reverse proxy position is quoted both as 84.1% and as 24.3%, and the two are not in conflict. The first is its share of the reverse proxy market — of websites that use a proxy at all. The second is its share of every website on the web, including the 71.1% that use no proxy. Which figure is appropriate depends on the question: 84.1% describes competitive position within the market, 24.3% describes systemic exposure across the web.
SSL certificate authorities: the dependency nobody chooses
Almost every website now runs over HTTPS, which requires a certificate from a certificate authority. Most site owners never select one — the host provisions it automatically. The result is the second most concentrated layer measured here: Let’s Encrypt issues certificates for 64.6% of all websites, a market share of 68.1%.
SSL certificate authority market share
A website may use more than one certificate authority, so shares do not sum to exactly 100%.
Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026.
Chart may be reproduced with attribution to paidhosting.com- Only 2.7% of websites use none of the certificate authorities tracked, indicating near-universal HTTPS adoption.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
- A further 1.6% of websites present a certificate for an invalid domain and 0.6% present an expired certificate.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
- Let’s Encrypt and GlobalSign together account for 89.0% of the certificate authority market.Source: Paid Hosting calculation from W3Techs data, 10 August 2026
DNS providers: moderately concentrated
DNS sits between a visitor typing a domain and reaching the site, and a DNS failure takes a website offline as completely as a server failure does. Concentration here is real but less severe than at the proxy or certificate layers: Cloudflare leads with 17.7% of all websites, followed by GoDaddy at 9.9%.
DNS providers by share of all websites
The authoritative DNS provider resolving each domain.
Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026. Bar lengths are scaled to the largest value shown.
Chart may be reproduced with attribution to paidhosting.comWeb server software: a four-way split
Software concentration behaves differently from company concentration, because open-source software has no single operator who can fail. Nginx leads at 31.6% of websites whose web server is known, but Cloudflare Server at 29.1% is a notable entry — it represents sites where the response is served by Cloudflare’s own software rather than the origin’s.
Web server software by share of websites
Percentages are of websites whose web server can be identified.
Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026. A website may report more than one server, so figures exceed 100% in total.
Chart may be reproduced with attribution to paidhosting.com- Among JavaScript content delivery networks, CDNJS holds 48.2% of the market and jsDelivr 37.6%, though 76.0% of websites use none of the tracked JavaScript CDNs.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
- Google Hosted Libraries retains 30.5% of the JavaScript CDN market, serving 7.3% of all websites.Source: W3Techs, 10 August 2026
Why concentration shows up in outage data
Concentration is not only a question of market structure. It determines how far a single failure travels, and that is where the gradient stops being an abstraction. A site owner who has never heard of their certificate authority still goes dark if it fails. Independent outage research shows the pattern the layer data predicts: Uptime Institute, which has tracked publicly reported outages for over a decade, finds that third-party IT and data centre providers — cloud, telecommunications and colocation companies — consistently account for the majority of incidents, reflecting a shift toward outsourced services in which one failure has widespread reach.
- Third-party providers — cloud, telecommunications and colocation — account for the majority of publicly reported outages, a consequence of the shift toward outsourced infrastructure.Source: Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026, May 2026
- Networking and connectivity is the most commonly reported cause of IT service outages at 23%, ahead of power at 21% — and networking is the layer most likely to be supplied by someone other than the site owner.Source: Uptime Institute Data Center Resiliency Survey 2026 (n=403)
- Outages involving telecommunications providers rose significantly above the 2020–2025 average during 2025, while outages involving cloud and internet providers fell below it — the burden shifting between shared layers rather than disappearing.Source: Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026, May 2026
- Half (50%) of operators reported an impactful outage in the previous three years, the lowest level recorded since 2020 and down from 74% — individual reliability has improved even as shared dependency has deepened.Source: Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2025 (n=754), published May 2026
The clearest illustration of the gradient on this page is a single name appearing at three separate levels of the stack. Cloudflare sits in front of 24.3% of all websites as a reverse proxy, resolves DNS for 17.7% of them, and serves 29.1% of the sites whose web server can be identified. These are overlapping but distinct populations, and no site owner shopping for a host is choosing any of them deliberately. A provider that holds a quarter of one layer is a market leader; a provider present at three layers at once is something the concentration figures for any single layer do not capture.
Uptime Institute surveys data centre and IT operators running critical infrastructure, not small business website owners, and its incident data is not broken down by the infrastructure layers measured on this page. It establishes that third-party dependencies dominate reported outages; it does not by itself prove that market concentration is the cause, and we have not presented it as though it does. The connection between the two is a reasonable inference from measurements taken by different organisations for different purposes, and it should be read as that rather than as a single finding.
Sources & Methodology
Market share figures on this page are drawn from a single source, W3Techs, retrieved on 10 August 2026. Using one source across all six layers is deliberate: it means the layer-to-layer comparison that forms the basis of this page is methodologically consistent, since every figure is produced by the same survey method against the same site population. Cross-source comparisons would introduce differences in sample, definition and date that would make the gradient between layers unreliable.
W3Techs surveys the top 10 million websites by traffic ranking and groups brands owned by the same corporate entity. Its figures describe share of websites, not share of traffic, revenue or infrastructure capacity — a provider serving many small sites will rank higher here than one serving fewer, larger sites. Percentages given as “market share” are calculated against websites using that category of service; percentages given as share of all websites include those using none. Where we have combined figures ourselves, the calculation is attributed to Paid Hosting inline.
Outage figures are from Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis 2026 executive summary, published May 2026, which draws on the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2025 and the Data Center Resiliency Survey 2026. Sample sizes are stated inline where Uptime discloses them.
- W3Techs — Market share of web hosting providers, retrieved 10 August 2026
- W3Techs — Market share of data centre providers, retrieved 10 August 2026
- W3Techs — Market share of reverse proxy services, retrieved 10 August 2026
- W3Techs — Market share of SSL certificate authorities, retrieved 10 August 2026
- W3Techs — Market share of DNS server providers, retrieved 10 August 2026
- W3Techs — Market share of web servers, retrieved 10 August 2026
- W3Techs — Market share of JavaScript content delivery networks, retrieved 10 August 2026
- Uptime Institute — Annual Outage Analysis 2026, executive summary, May 2026
Last reviewed 11 August 2026. Market share data on this page is refreshed quarterly; W3Techs updates its underlying reports daily, so figures may differ slightly from the live source between our reviews.