Previous stats on SA webhosting marketshare had a serious flaw: it covered only 70,000 COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, INFO domains, that were hosted in South Africa while my research covers all 643,453 .co.za domain names, that are registered as of June 1st, 2011. My research does also include .co.za domains hosted overseas, as many clients avoid local companies and use cheap international webhosting companies with unlimited bandwidth offerings.
See the 50 biggest co.za domain hosting Companies:
I published the full list of the 50 biggest domain hosting companies / nameservers on http://randolf.jorberg.com/web-hosting-south-africa/ and I intend to update it regularly.
Methodology: This research is based on the number of .co.za domains registered to your nameservers. If you are a reseller or you are using someone elses nameservers I have no way of finding out about you. While my research covered the 100 most frequently used nameservers, I might have missed some nameservers from companies whose aggregated numbers would’ve made it to the list. I found companies with up to five nameserver-sets but I can’t guarantee completeness of my current list. I ask companies or clients who notice that there’s a discrepancy to their own count that you contact me and I’ll update the data ASAP.
That’s *very* interesting – thanks for taking the time to share your results.
Happy to help…
I think it is interesting but of course market share also implies revenue. Companies like IS and MWEB may have less domains hosted but the question is how much bandwidth from large corporate clients they get to bill on.
So – yes – interesting but should make clear what this really indicates.
Elan, of course does the number of domain names only give a very limited view onto the industry, and looking at the number of domain names is probably saying as much about a web hosting company as does looking at the alexa rank to find out how good an e-commerce business does turnover-wise 😉
I do though think that it gives quite a good indicator of the number of individual clients this company was able to find and the success of Hetzner can only surprise you again and again though they certainly generate less turnover than IS or Mweb…
These stats does not mean anything more than purely the amount of domain registrations done via Uniform SA but even these stats not accurate.
IS and Mweb allegedly manages more than 5 times the number reported and an individual called gavindurni@gmail.com is in the top 10 of your reported numbers.
Matt: so far I’m quite positive that these numbers are damn exact – I checked back with some of the companies listed here before publishing this piece and Mweb did even confirm my numbers on their Facebook-Wall: http://www.facebook.com/MWEB/posts/193016070751216
And Gavins Domains are always parked with Sedo, thus they are part of the 23226 domains parked on sedoparking.com…
Hi Randolf. You realize that your farming of .co.za name servers has caused Uniforum to shut down the lookup that allowed DNS server checking?
I’d been using it for years before you trumpeted it out to the world.
Here’s a life lesson: Don’t kick a sleeping dog cos he’ll probably bite you in the ass.
Good luck with your followup results Gandalf.
Indeed – Uniforum disabled the display of results a while ago. Too bad for the stat-junkie – hope they’ll release some official stats soon.