GoKawiilresearch
We looked at the primary website apex and www records for 19,450 European company entities and asked a narrow question: which infrastructure vendor is serving the company's main web presence?
Across seven European markets, US-headquartered vendors serve the majority of primary company websites in two of them (the United Kingdom at 67.5% and the Netherlands at 53.6%), and the plurality in three more (Italy, Spain, and France, each between 44% and 49%). Cloudflare is the single largest internet-facing infrastructure vendor in every one of the seven countries we sampled, ahead of every other US vendor, every European hosting company, and every domestic ISP.
This is not an IP-geolocation study. It is a vendor attribution study. For each apex domain, we resolved DNS A/AAAA records and mapped the answering IPs to their announcing autonomous system. For CDN and proxy providers such as Cloudflare, that identifies the internet-facing serving vendor, not necessarily the origin host.
Vendor share by country
Each bar shows the percentage of primary company websites in that country served by a US-headquartered infrastructure vendor. The remainder is the "Other / regional" bucket, which includes European hosting companies, domestic ISPs, in-house infrastructure, and international vendors not matched by our keyword rules.
0% 25% 50% 75% 100% UK 67.5% NL 53.6% IT 48.4% ES 44.6% FR 44.2% DE 31.0% PL 18.8% US-HQ vendors serve the majority of the country's websites US-HQ vendors are the largest cluster, but not a majority Domestic hosting is the largest cluster Share of primary company websites served by US-headquartered infrastructure vendors, by market.
Germany and Poland are the exceptions. Both have a dense domestic hosting industry (Hetzner, IONOS, STRATO, Mittwald in Germany; Home.pl, NetArt, ATMAN, Beyond in Poland) that shows up clearly in the observations. Everywhere else, US-headquartered vendors are either the plurality (Italy, Spain, France) or the majority (the UK, the Netherlands).
One vendor, in every country
The single largest internet-facing infrastructure vendor in every one of the seven markets is Cloudflare. Not the largest of the US-headquartered vendors, the largest of all vendors, foreign and domestic.
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