| The concept So you run a hosting company, and you think you're doing pretty good, right? But how good - and how much better than your competition across town? That's where HostCount comes into play - it displays a relative ranking of just about every hosting company in the world. On top of that, HostCount lets you quickly see how the market is changing - growing or shrinking, and what trends are starting to take shape before others even know they've happened. The information is provided to anyone who is interested, although it is really geared towards hosting providers themselves, and less so for clients. For example, it certainly is interesting from a business perspective to know that XYZ Hosting is ranked higher than ABC Hosting, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything much to the consumer. XYZ Hosting may pride itself on having the cheapest hosting and nonexistant technical support, while ABC Hosting is a full featured shop offering design, consulting, etc. So people in the biz know who they compare with, while any customers reading this should realize that just because a company is ranked higher than another, doesn't necessarily mean it's the best one for you - but you certainly should explore it along with all your options. How it works Once a night, the HostCount server goes out and retrieves any new items from several sources, including Fixed Orbit, RIPE, etc. After it gathers everything it needs, it parses all the information and stores it into the primary database, filtering the intermediate data to eliminate duplicate or unnecessary information. Once it is satisfied with the database it is ready to update the live database, which happens once a week (due to update schedules of some sources, along with CPU time on the database server). What means what While it would be great to track every single hosting company in the world, the fact of the matter is that it isn't practical to do. There are literally thousands of small hosting companies, normally with less that 20 or 30 clients that are not indexed by HostCount. This is also true for most resellers, unless they go out of their way to differentiate themselves from the company they resell for (have their own machines, get their own AS numbers, etc). That being said, you'd be hard pressed to NOT find any hosting company that has more than 100 customers that ISN'T indexed by HostCount, so the vast majority of hosting companies are tracked. Keep in mind that the more clients a hosting company has, the more accurate the information is (this is courtesy of the Law of Large Numbers), but even with the companies with a relatively small number of clients, the margin of error shouldn't be too great. Link to us Like HostCount? The only thing better than telling all your friends about the site is putting a link to it on your website! While we don't do any link exchanges or advertising at all, we greatly appreciate every link you can send our way! Questions If for some reason you need to contact us, you may do so via the Contact page. Please do not ask for your company to be indexed, or to tell me that you are larger than someone else on the site - there is no way to change the relatively ranking of individual sites, just the mechanism that weights all the sites listed.
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