There are more than 1.8 billion websites worldwide, according to InternetLiveStatistics, and their number is constantly growing. The global web hosting industry is worth approx. estimated at 71 billion dollars, COVID played a significant role in the growth experienced in recent years. Global Industry predicted that this value could rise to over 150 billion dollars by 2026. This is considered a relatively high forecast, but since demand is constantly increasing, there is a chance for this.
The USA has got the most domain names, this number is almost 50 million, and China follows with more than 16 million hosted domains.
It isn’t surprising that globally 34.98% of domains use the .com extension. The second most popular TLD among all extensions is .tk, with only 5%. One might be surprised since .tk is the regional extension of Tokelau, but Internet fraudsters also tend to choose this extension, so it is understandable why this number is so high.
The most popular new gTLD is the .info domain extension, followed by .xyz. Why are the new gTLDs good? Because more and more websites and popular domain extensions are running out of good options, these offer a great alternative.
The web hosting industry is developing very quickly, constantly adapting to the users, so the experts can forecast more trends.
According to industry forecasts, cloud storage is expected to grow by 18% per year, making it the fastest-growing type of storage.
The demand for green web hosting providers is also increasing, they use environmentally friendly initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of their data centres. Institutions are slowly but steadily adopting greener methods as they become more and more aware of the environmental effects of their daily operations.
HTTP is being phased out in favour of HTTPS. In 2018, Google Chrome actively restricted consumer access to websites that still use HTTP instead of HTTPS. 86% of websites currently use HTTPS but expect this number to approach 100% soon.
Sources: https://bloggingwizard.com/web-hosting-statistics/, https://www.couponzania.com/blog/web-hosting-trends-2023/
