Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's largest cloud service provider. From its data centers, the company offers more than 200 full-featured services, including computing, storage and databases. GoDaddy, the hugely successful web hosting company, has dominated the industry for more than 20 years. It is apparently the world's first web server and domain registrar, with more than 84 million domain names under management and 7,000 employees worldwide.
GoDaddy specializes in affordable, easy-to-use shared hosting and domain registrations. When moving to a company based outside the US, 1% 261 IONOS becomes the fourth largest hosting provider in the world. This Germany-based host has global appeal due to its full suite of services, affordable prices and customer support. The company employs more than 2,000 people worldwide and offers services in 10 countries in Europe and North America.
DigitalOcean specializes in cloud hosting. The company has more than 500,000 customers in 177 countries and more than 575,000 web applications running on its servers. Liquid Web is a luxury hosting brand that bypasses the crowded and in-demand shared hosting market to reach more than 30,000 customers in more than 130 countries around the world. The company focuses on the best managed services due to its intriguing variety of dedicated, cloud and VPS arrays; the Liquid Web portfolio includes dedicated servers, cloud VPS, dedicated cloud, private cloud and the Cloud Sites platform purchased from Rackspace.
WP Engine doesn't host as many websites as some of the other companies on this list, but still has a global presence with servers in 35 countries and more than 70,000 customers in 150 countries. WP Engine also employs more than 600 people in offices in the United States and Europe. GoDaddy is a popular choice for American websites; it has 18 million customers in total and maintains an unwavering command of the United States. The company maintains 14 facilities across multiple countries, including a 270,000 square foot building in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Amazon Web Services is also behind Major League Baseball's Statcast calculations. This high-speed and accurate automated tool is based on more than 17 petabytes of data that the league generates every season. Google Cloud has the world's largest private cloud network with 17 regions (and growing), more than 100 points of presence and more than 100,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable. Companies like Charles Schwab, Sony Music, Spotify, Johnson & Johnson and Hearst rely on Google Cloud for their pay-as-you-go model for cloud hosting.
DreamHost serves more than 400,000 customers in more than 100 countries with its focus on open source and WordPress content management system. The company was founded in a Harvey Mudd College dorm room in 1997 and is now home to more than 1.5 million websites - half of which use WordPress. OVHcloud is the only French hosting provider on our list; it has more than 1.5 million customers in 184 countries and more than 260,000 servers spread across 19 data centers. OVH offers virtual, dedicated, shared and cloud private server options as well as a popular webmail service.
IBM Cloud - formerly known as SoftLayer or Bluemix - encompasses infrastructure products as a service and platform as a service to offer customers a one-stop-shop for everything related to cloud computing, storage and networking. The company's network stands out for its resilience and redundancy with nearly 60 data centers spread across 19 countries on six continents; two data centers are specifically reserved for federal government agencies that must meet strict compliance and security requirements. IBM Cloud supports access to other IBM tools and services such as Watson question and answer system making it an ideal choice for companies looking for solutions around natural language processing, machine learning and automation. GoDaddy is still the largest web hosting company out there; while better known as a domain registrar (despite ranking first on this list), GoDaddy offers a wide selection of web hosting plans for all budgets ranging from cheap shared hosting to affordable managed WordPress hosting to VPS and dedicated server plans.
Bluehost is another big name in hosting worldwide; it offers some of the cheapest shared hosting plans out there along with managed WordPress hosting plans, VPS and even dedicated servers using cPanel as its base but adding its own custom hosting panel to make it easier for users to manage their websites. Hetzner is another German web hosting company that is especially popular in Europe but doesn't have much of a presence outside Europe.
