Netcraft analysis revolutionizes hosting industry market research

Anonymous writes "November 10th, BATH, England – Netcraft announced today that its Hosting Provider Switching Analysis, launched in June, is now licensed by hosting companies who provide the infrastructure for over 14% of the active web sites on the Internet.

Using Netcraft's switching analysis, a hosting company can identify where new customers were previously hosted, where customers it has lost have moved to, and inspect the same information for any of the world's top 1500 hosting companies.

"We see Netcraft's switching analysis as a key indicator of customer satisfaction," says Robert Marsh, EV1Servers' founder and CEO. "We've found it to be an invaluable tool for monitoring our performance relative to other hosting providers. By providing a quantitative measurement of our quality of service, Netcraft's data has helped keep us on our toes."

Within a few months of launch the analysis has been licensed by many of the leading companies in the hosting industry as a way of tracking their own progress, identifying both weak and dangerous competitors, gauging the impact of competitive upgrade offers, and researching their entry into new markets.

"1&1 Internet is the world's biggest web host and a crucial aspect of our growth is to constantly improve and evolve our products and services”, says Andreas Gauger, CEO of 1&1 Internet AG. “Netcraft's Switching Analysis has been of great value to us. Netcraft keeps an unerring eye on the market and provides us with reliable figures. The Hosting Provider Switching Analysis helps any observer to identify the web host that cares most for its customers."

The hosting industry continues to be extremely competitive with early venture funded leaders losing ground to a new wave of organically grown hosting providers funded by customer revenues. Timely and accurate data on the movements of sites between hosting providers is critical to hosting companies, their suppliers and investors.

"Netcraft represents a real revolution in market research. Firms like Gartner can tell you what they think people are going to do. Netcraft can tell you what people are actually doing." said Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Associates.

The dataset covers hosting providers worldwide and monitors movements of web sites in all gTLD and ccTLD domains. Netcraft continually explores the internet finding new sites and queries each to determine the web server, operating system, and hosting location. Netcraft currently has over 45 million web sites in its database, and compares the hosting location of each site month by month to track market changes in the hosting industry.

About Netcraft Netcraft is an Internet services company based in Bath, England. It has explored the Internet since 1995 and is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers, ISPs, encrypted transactions, electronic commerce, scripting languages and content technologies on the internet. Netcraft has a cosmopolitan client list spread through the UK, the USA, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Details of the Hosting Provider Switching Analysis are available here.
For more information, mail info@netcraft.com "