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The third-largest provider, Host Europe, assuming the brand of new owner Pipex in the deal between the two British providers is the fourth major merger this year for the European hosting market.

Host Europe PLC, which was bought by Pipex in April for 31 million pounds, has changed its name to Pipex Communications Hosting Ltd. and will rebrand its web site later this month. In May, NetBenefit bought com London-based rival Easily Ltd. for 2.5 million pounds. In a pair of January deals, ViaNet.Works of Amsterdam acquired France’s Amen (which hosted 111k hostnames) and Lycos Europe bought United-Domains of Munich.

The consolidation hasn’t altered the dominance of hosting companies in Germany and the UK, which are home to the nine largest hosts in the EMEA (Europe-Middle East-Africa). Germany has twice as many hostnames as any other country in the region, driven by the success of 1&1 Internet AG and Tect AG (Stratos), the two German hosting giants who continue to amass customers. 1&1 now hosts more than 4 million hostnames, while Tect has more than 2.1 million. The largest EMEA provider not based in Germany or the UK is Italy’s Aruba, with 240k hostnames.

Germany remains well behind the United States, which has more than 24 million web-facing hostnames, but comfortably ahead of the United Kingdom, which has 4.6 million. Italy, the Netherlands and France are the only other European nations with 1 million or more hostnames found in our survey.

Netcraft’s Hosting Provider Switching Analysis identifies movements of sites from one hosting provider to another on a monthly basis. Analyzing this information presents a unique bird’s eye view of the hosting industry, identifying winners who are able to take sites from other hosting companies. Using the dataset, a hosting company can see both where their new business came from, and the providers to whom it has lost business. It can also see the site switching information for any of the top 1,000 hosting providers on the Internet, as well as which geographic markets are expanding.

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