Geo-Lesson about where your favorite sites are actually being served
These days on the world wide web it is becoming easier and easier to scale out hosting through the use of cloud web providers and others that can offer great reliability and high uptime. Most of the major websites these days either self host or utilize a major cloud platform.
The infographic we have found thanks to Venture Beat about some of the top providers include ThePlanet, Godaddy, Google, Softlayer, Rackspace, Hostgator, Amazon, and Peer1 Networks among others.
Global Good Networks hosts through Akamai for the Content Delivery Needs which ultimately hosts and caches all of our websites files around the world. Akamai is utilized by major Enterprises and almost all of the largest websites to store their static, also known as non changing files like images or some html pages, on over 100,000 servers around the world. So even if these top hosting providers and countries are the “origin” location of where much of this data is stored originally, most of their files really reside on servers that are close to users in almost all locations such as Los Angeles or Amsterdam among tens of thousands of others.
Interesting to know, as far as their data collection, is that the top 1 million list of websites was taken from Alexa.com. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Alexa’s process for finding out exactly what these top 1 million websites are, it consists of them having a browser toolbar installed on millions of peoples’ browsers. The toolbar shows you how popular a website is Globally as well as within its local country.
Interesting stats include that Houston was one of the most popular cities for hosting within the 50,000 most visited sites.
READ MORE DIRECTLY ON VENTURE BEAT: http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/06/where-the-worlds-million-most-visited-websites-are-hosted-infographic/
