New surveys on web server locations

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 2 February 2016 in News, Server Locations

USA is dominating our server location statistics with 42.8% of web servers being installed there. A bit more surprising is the second rank of Germany, hosting 9% of web servers, almost as much as the following Japan and Russia combined.

USA is even stronger among the top 1000 sites with 65.3%. However, one has to keep in mind that top sites tend to have servers in several countries. That means, that 65.3% of the top 1000 sites have at least one of their servers in the USA, but not necessarily all of them. The most popular countries after USA among the top 1000 sites are Netherlands and China.

If we drill down server location statistics by top level domain, we find that, unsurprisingly, country top level domains are mostly located in their own country. For example, 91.6% of .de sites are located in Germany, 95.3% of .jp sites are hosted in Japan, and 96% of .kr sites are located in South Korea. Other countries are more international, for example only 72.4% of .ru sites are in Russia, and only 64.6% of .uk sites are hosted in the UK. Some countries even do not host the majority of their sites, for instance only 37.1% of .ca sites are located in Canada (61.5% in USA), only 22.8% of .in sites are in India (57.6% in USA) and only 28.7% of .gr sites are physically located in Greece (33.1% in Germany).

If we do a similar break down by hosting provider, we find the ones that host only in their home country, such as Media Temple and CyrusOne 100% USA, and Sakura 100% Japan. The distribution of some of the other big players is more interesting, e.g. 62.4% of Amazon servers are located in USA, 22.3% in Ireland and 6.0% in Japan, whereas OVH is present in France (75.5%), Canada (10.1%), USA (6.4%) and Spain (5.2%).

There is also a somewhat surprisingly strong connection between server location and operating systems running on the servers. More Debian servers are located in Germany than anywhere else, whereas the majority of Ubuntu servers is in the USA. Almost half of all Gentoo servers are located in Russia, and the most popular location of Scientific Linux servers is Japan. Mandriva thrives in France, CloudLinux in Spain and Asianux in China.

The fastest growing web server locations are in that order Russia, Ireland, Singapore, France and Turkey. Netherlands, USA, China, UK and Germany were losing market share in the last month.

We will keep publishing up-to-date server location statistics, so that you can watch the latest trends in that market. Much more details can be found in our market reports.

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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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