Biggest web hosting companies

The biggest web hosting company in the world is Hostinger, which hosts 5.2% of all websites. Next come United Internet (IONOS, STRATO and sister brands) and the GoDaddy Group at 2.5% each, followed by OVHcloud at 2.4%. Together, the ten largest web hosting companies host about one in four websites. These figures come from the W3Techs web hosting survey, with data from 6 November 2026.

Top 10 biggest web hosting companies at a glance

The ranking measures one thing: the percentage of all websites in the W3Techs survey that a hosting company hosts, with all brands of the same owner counted together.

Source: W3Techs, usage of web hosting providers, data of 6 November 2026. Companies with the same rounded share are listed in the order W3Techs shows them. Website builders and hyperscale clouds are not included; see how this ranking was made.

The 10 biggest web hosting companies in detail

The profiles below combine the W3Techs share with facts from each company's own publications. Customer numbers and revenue are figures the companies report about themselves; W3Techs does not verify them, and they include activities other than hosting.

1. Hostinger: 5.2% of all websites

Hostinger hosts more than twice as many websites as the number two. The company was founded in 2004 in Kaunas, Lithuania, has used the Hostinger name since 2011 and is now headquartered in Vilnius. It is privately held and has never been listed on a stock exchange.

Hostinger grew on low-cost shared and WordPress hosting sold under one global brand, with local brands such as Niagahoster in Indonesia and Weblink in Brazil. It has since added VPS and cloud hosting and an AI website builder. In its results for 2025, Hostinger reported 4.6 million customers in more than 150 countries and revenue of €275.4 million, up 51% on 2024. No other company in this top 10 reports growth at that pace.

See the Hostinger provider page, read Hostinger reviews from customers, or compare Hostinger web hosting plans and Hostinger VPS plans.

2. United Internet (IONOS, STRATO and others): 2.5%

United Internet AG, based in Montabaur, Germany, was founded in 1988 by Ralph Dommermuth, who still holds a majority. Its hosting business is IONOS Group SE, listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since February 2023 and majority-owned by United Internet. The hosting brands are IONOS, STRATO, Arsys (Spain), Fasthosts (UK), home.pl (Poland), World4You (Austria), united-domains and InterNetX.

W3Techs attributes about 61.5% of the group's sites to IONOS and 21% to STRATO; home.pl, Arsys, World4You, united-domains and Fasthosts make up the rest. For 2025, IONOS reported 6.63 million customers and revenue of €1.32 billion. Its range runs from shared hosting and website builders to VPS, dedicated servers and the IONOS Cloud.

Compare IONOS and STRATO plans, or read IONOS reviews and STRATO reviews.

3. GoDaddy Group: 2.5%

GoDaddy was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons and is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. It has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2015 (ticker GDDY). GoDaddy is best known as a domain registrar: according to its annual report for 2025 it managed about 81 million domains for 20.4 million customers, with revenue of $4.95 billion.

Hosting is one part of that business, next to domains, website building, online stores, payments and an AI assistant called Airo. Within the W3Techs group, about 84% of the hosted sites are on GoDaddy itself and 12% on Host Europe, which GoDaddy bought in 2017 together with Domainfactory and 123 Reg. The UK brand Heart Internet, part of the same deal, was sold to Your.Online in 2024.

4. OVHcloud: 2.4%

OVHcloud is the largest hosting company in France. Octave Klaba founded it in 1999 in Roubaix, where it is still based, and it has been listed on Euronext Paris since 2021, with the Klaba family as controlling shareholder. Klaba returned as chairman and CEO in October 2025.

Unlike most companies in this top 10, OVHcloud builds its own servers and runs its own data centres: 44 data centres on four continents with more than 500,000 servers. For its fiscal year to 31 August 2025 it reported about 1.6 million customers in over 140 countries and revenue of €1.08 billion. Its range covers shared web hosting, VPS, dedicated (bare-metal) servers and public and private cloud, with a focus on European data sovereignty.

5. Newfold Digital (Bluehost, HostGator and others): 2.3%

Newfold Digital was formed in 2021 by combining Endurance International Group with Web.com. It is privately owned by the investment firms Clearlake Capital and Siris and is based in Jacksonville, Florida. Its portfolio includes Bluehost, HostGator, Network Solutions, Web.com, Register.com, Domain.com and Crazy Domains, as well as the WordPress SEO plugin Yoast.

W3Techs attributes 26.6% of the group's sites to Bluehost and 11.7% to HostGator; the largest part is hosted under the Newfold name itself. In 2025 the company split into a Bluehost group (hosting and WordPress) and a Network Solutions group (domains and web presence), and sold its corporate domain business MarkMonitor.

Sources disagree on Newfold's size. The company and its owner Clearlake said in December 2025 that it serves nearly 7 million customers. A credit analysis by S&P, as reported in early 2026, put the number at about 5.8 million and described a declining customer base. Because Newfold is private and publishes no audited figures, neither number can be checked independently.

Compare Bluehost and HostGator plans, see HostGator web hosting, or read Bluehost reviews and HostGator reviews.

6. team.blue: 2.3%

team.blue rarely sells under its own name, which makes it one of the least known companies in this list. It was formed in 2019 by merging the Belgian Combell Group, the Dutch TransIP Group and the Register Group, and is based in Ghent, Belgium. It is backed by private equity: Hg is the largest shareholder, and the Canadian pension fund CPP Investments bought a stake of about 20% in 2024 at a valuation of €4.8 billion.

team.blue grew through acquisitions and owns local hosting brands across Europe, including Combell (Belgium), TransIP and Vimexx (Netherlands), Register.it (Italy), Loopia (Sweden), Simply.com (Denmark), Webempresa (Spain) and Names.co.uk (UK), plus WordPress and e-commerce specialists such as Raidboxes, Hypernode and maxcluster. The company says it serves 3.4 million customers in 22 European countries. Since 2024 it has also bought software companies for small businesses, such as the Czech e-commerce platform Shoptet.

7. Hetzner: 2.1%

Hetzner Online was founded in 1997 by Martin Hetzner in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria, and is a private family company. It owns data centre parks in Nuremberg and Falkenstein (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland), and offers cloud servers from Ashburn and Hillsboro in the US and from Singapore.

Hetzner is known for dedicated servers and cloud VPS at low prices, which makes it popular with developers, agencies and other hosting companies. It also sells shared web hosting and domains. From 1 April 2026 it raised prices on several products, citing higher costs for memory and other hardware. Hetzner does not publish customer numbers; the last revenue figure in public sources is from 2021.

For similar products, see our VPS hosting comparison.

8. SiteGround: 2.0%

SiteGround was founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria, by a group of university friends and is privately owned. It is, with Hostinger, one of two companies in this top 10 that grew mainly under a single brand rather than through large acquisitions.

SiteGround focuses on managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. Since 2020 its platform runs on Google Cloud. In February 2026 it relaunched as an all-in-one platform for building, hosting and growing a website, with its own AI tools, and in April 2026 it added an e-commerce product. SiteGround publishes no recent customer figures.

Compare SiteGround plans or read SiteGround reviews. For alternatives, see our WordPress hosting comparison.

9. DigitalOcean Group (DigitalOcean and Cloudways): 1.5%

DigitalOcean was founded in 2012, has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2021 (ticker DOCN) and is headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado. It built its name with simple cloud servers ("Droplets") for developers and small businesses, and has added managed databases, Kubernetes and GPU servers for AI.

In 2022 DigitalOcean bought Cloudways for $350 million. Cloudways offers managed WordPress and PHP hosting on cloud servers without the need for server administration, and W3Techs attributes 36% of the group's sites to it. For 2025, DigitalOcean reported revenue of $901 million and more than 640,000 customers.

Compare Cloudways plans or read Cloudways reviews.

10. XServer: 1.4%

XServer is the only company in this top 10 that serves almost exclusively one country. The service was started in 2003 by Hiroki Kobayashi; the company is based in Osaka and privately held. XServer says it operates about 2.5 million websites on XServer and XServer Business and, citing Dataprovider data from June 2025, hosts over a third of all WordPress sites in Japan.

Its products are shared and WordPress hosting ("rental servers"), business hosting, VPS and domains, all for the Japanese market. Its place in the global top 10 shows how large a single national market can be when one provider leads it.

Other large web hosting companies

Below the top 10, shares drop quickly. These are the next largest web hosting companies in the same W3Techs data, with the same exclusions:

What the ranking tells us about the hosting market

A fragmented market with a few large groups

Even the largest web host has a share of about 5%, and the ten largest together reach about 24% of all websites. The rest is spread over thousands of providers. Behind many familiar names, though, are a few groups: five of the top 10 grew mainly by buying other hosts (United Internet, GoDaddy, Newfold Digital, team.blue and DigitalOcean), and group.one, Your.Online and Hosting.com Group follow the same strategy one step lower.

Ownership: listed companies and private equity

Four companies in the top 10 are listed (United Internet through IONOS, GoDaddy, OVHcloud and DigitalOcean), and they publish audited figures. Newfold Digital and team.blue are owned by private equity, and Hostinger, Hetzner, SiteGround and XServer are privately held by founders or families. For the private companies, size can only be judged from what they report about themselves, or from surveys such as W3Techs.

Organic growth still works

Hostinger and SiteGround reached the top 10 without large acquisitions. Both grew under one brand with their own control panels and a clear focus: Hostinger on low prices at a global scale, SiteGround on managed WordPress hosting.

Regional strongholds

Six of the ten companies are headquartered in Europe, three in the United States and one in Japan. Several are strongest in their home market: IONOS and STRATO in Germany, OVHcloud in France, team.blue in the Benelux, and XServer in Japan, where GMO and Sakura also rank among the largest hosts. Hostinger is the exception: based in Lithuania, it sells worldwide. Local language support, payment methods and data centres in the same jurisdiction keep regional hosts competitive.

Website builders compete for the same customers

The largest single platform in the W3Techs list is not a web host but Shopify, and Wix and Squarespace are also among the largest. For many small businesses, an all-in-one builder replaces classic hosting. Hostinger, GoDaddy and SiteGround respond with their own AI website builders.

Is the biggest web host the best choice?

Not necessarily. Size says something about continuity and the range of services, but little about the plan that suits your website. A large group can offer a wide choice and good infrastructure, while a smaller, specialised host may offer faster support or better WordPress tooling. What matters is the combination of features, server location, support and the price after the first contract term.

Our web hosting comparison lists current plans of large and small hosts side by side, and you can also compare WordPress hosting and VPS hosting. Current discounts are on our deals page.

How this ranking was made

Source and date. The shares come from the W3Techs web hosting overview, as published on 6 November 2026. W3Techs surveys a large sample of the most visited websites worldwide and updates its figures daily, so they shift a little from day to day.

Metric. The ranking uses one metric only: the percentage of all websites in the survey hosted by a company. This share includes websites whose host could not be identified, so shares among identified hosts would be higher, but the order would stay the same. The metric counts websites, not customers or revenue; a host with many small sites can rank above a host with fewer, larger customers. Revenue and customer figures in the profiles are context, not part of the ranking.

Scope. The survey is global. It does not show market shares per country, so a host that leads one country, such as XServer in Japan, can rank below hosts with a wider international spread.

Groups and brands. W3Techs counts all brands of one owner together, so each website is counted once, at group level. "United Internet" includes IONOS and STRATO, and "Newfold Digital" includes Bluehost and HostGator. Brand splits within a group come from the W3Techs group pages. W3Techs also separates the company that sells the hosting from the company that owns the hardware: SiteGround's sites count for SiteGround, even though they run on Google Cloud.

Ties. W3Techs rounds shares to one decimal. Companies with the same rounded share are listed in W3Techs' order, so the difference between, for example, United Internet and GoDaddy is too small to call.

Who we left out, and why

The W3Techs list mixes web hosting companies with platforms that do not sell hosting you can use for any website. Readers looking for the biggest web hosts want to know which companies sell hosting for their own site, so we applied two exclusions:

• SaaS-only platforms. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace host many sites, but only sites built with their own builder or shop software; you cannot run WordPress or your own code there. The same applies to Webflow, Tilda, Duda and WordPress.com (Automattic).
• Hyperscale and developer clouds. Amazon (AWS) offers infrastructure building blocks that you have to configure yourself, which is a different product for a different audience than web hosting. For the same reason we left out Google, Microsoft, Vercel and Netlify.

DigitalOcean is included because 36% of its group's sites are on Cloudways, a managed hosting service that requires no server knowledge. GoDaddy and team.blue are included because, besides domains and website builders, they sell regular shared, WordPress and VPS hosting.

With these platforms included, Hostinger would rank second behind Shopify, and Amazon, Wix and Squarespace would enter the top 10. To compare the large clouds, see Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Limitations

• W3Techs surveys popular websites, not every registered domain. Hosts with many small or inactive sites may be under-represented compared with a count of all domains.
• Company figures (customers, revenue, websites) are self-reported, cover different periods and include activities other than hosting. They cannot be compared with each other as a ranking.
• Ownership changes quickly in this market. Brands are listed under the owner W3Techs shows on the date of the data.

Sources and references

• W3Techs, Usage statistics and market share of web hosting providers, data of 6 November 2026, and the group pages for United Internet, GoDaddy Group, Newfold Digital Group, team.blue and DigitalOcean Group.
• Hostinger, 2025 results, 23 February 2026; About Hostinger.
• IONOS Group, results for fiscal year 2025, March 2026.
• GoDaddy, annual report (Form 10-K) for 2025, SEC.
• OVHcloud, results for fiscal year 2025, 21 October 2025.
• Clearlake Capital, Newfold Digital completes sale of MarkMonitor to Com Laude, December 2025; HostingAdvice, report on the S&P credit analysis of Newfold Digital, 2026.
• team.blue, Our story, accessed November 2026; Hg, Sofina invests in team.blue.
• Hetzner, data centers and cloud locations; Tom's Hardware, Hetzner to raise prices from April 1, 2026.
• SiteGround, platform redesign announcement, February 2026.
• DigitalOcean, fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 results, 24 February 2026; DigitalOcean to acquire Cloudways, 23 August 2022.
• XServer, features and figures (Japanese), accessed November 2026.
• Further company facts: WP Engine, group.one, Your.Online, hosting.com, Domain Name Wire on CVC and Namecheap (September 2025) and SIX on the Infomaniak listing (1 October 2026).
• Official websites: Hostinger, IONOS Group, GoDaddy, OVHcloud, Newfold Digital, team.blue, Hetzner, SiteGround, DigitalOcean and XServer (Japanese).

Frequently asked questions

Which is the biggest web hosting company in Europe?

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Hostinger, headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, is the largest European-based web host by share of websites (5.2% according to W3Techs, November 2026), although it sells worldwide. Among hosts that are strongest in Europe itself, United Internet (IONOS and STRATO) leads with 2.5%, followed by OVHcloud (2.4%), team.blue (2.3%) and Hetzner (2.1%).

Which is the biggest web hosting company in the United States?

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Leaving out Amazon Web Services and SaaS platforms such as Shopify and Squarespace, the largest US-based web host is the GoDaddy Group with 2.5% of all websites, followed by Newfold Digital (Bluehost, HostGator) with 2.3% and the DigitalOcean Group (including Cloudways) with 1.5%.

Which web hosting company has the highest revenue?

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Among the ten companies in this ranking, GoDaddy reports the highest revenue: $4.95 billion for 2025. IONOS reported €1.32 billion for 2025 and OVHcloud €1.08 billion for its fiscal year to August 2025. These totals include domains, software and cloud services, and the private companies publish little or nothing, so a ranking by revenue would not be complete or comparable.

Who owns Bluehost and HostGator?

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Both belong to Newfold Digital, which is owned by the investment firms Clearlake Capital and Siris. Newfold also owns Network Solutions, Web.com, Register.com, Domain.com, Crazy Domains and the WordPress plugin Yoast.

Is GoDaddy the largest web host?

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GoDaddy is one of the largest domain registrars, with about 81 million domains under management, but not the largest web host. In the W3Techs data the GoDaddy Group hosts 2.5% of all websites, about the same as United Internet and less than half of Hostinger.