New surveys on the usage of DNS server providers

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 28 October 2019 in News, DNS Servers

DNS servers are often provided by domain name registrars, by web hosting providers or by specialized DNS server providers. Some webmaster set up their own DNS server, but most people are better off relying on the availability and robustness of professional DNS server providers, which often offer this service free of charge with their domain registration or hosting package.

Unlike other statistics on DNS servers you may find, we do not simply count the popularity of the various DNS servers, but we assign them to the companies or the group of companies they belong to. Amazon, for instance, operated well over 200 DNS server domains, none of them is hugely popular individually, but together Amazon is number 4 in our survey.

The GoDaddy Group, which includes the Host Europe Group and Media Temple, is the most used DNS server provider on the web.

The GoDaddy Group also happens to be the most popular web hosting provider, but interestingly 11.9% of the websites use GoDaddy as DNS server, but only 6.7% use them as hosting provider. Presumably, lots of domains are registered with GoDaddy, but hosted somewhere else. Actually, more that 50% use a different hosting provider, as our segmentation report reveals.

Next on the list of popular DNS server providers is Cloudflare, due to its hugely popular content delivery network service, which also includes provision of DNS servers.

Cloudflare is much more popular as DNS server provider than GoDaddy among high-traffic sites, and so is Amazon. The most high-traffic sites among their user base, however, is Akamai, another content delivery network service.

The most popular pure DNS server provider, meaning that it is not also a web hosting provider or domain registrar, is DNS Made Easy, used by 0.7% of the web, followed in that category by NS1.

There are very significant regional differences when it comes to choosing a DNS server provider. The GoDaddy Group is the most popular provider in USA, Canada, Mexico, UK and India. United Internet is popular in Germany, Poland and Spain, OVH in France and Belgium, Aruba in Italy, the RBC Group in Russia, the Alibaba Group in China, the GMO Internet Group in Japan, and Locaweb in Brazil.

At the moment we cover in our DNS server surveys all of the most popular providers. Watch this space, as we will add more providers in the future.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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