What’s the Best Way to Measure the Clouds?
Web domain hosting generates a lot of public data, and for years people have tried to scrape this domain data as evidence of this or that trend in computing. A great example was the use of Netcraft charts describing the operating system share of total domains.
This week a web research shop called InfiniBase released a study comparing the top 500k domains on the internet and how many of them were hosted on cloud providers. In all less than 1% of the domains were hosted primarily in the cloud. From what I can glean from their methods a site would need to have its primary domain directed to EC2
“servers and domains whose primary website (www.domain.com) are not on EC2 – are not covered”
They have done a nice job of eliminating noise by looking at only the top 500k sites, but this could leave some start up projects out of the survey.
The Big News
The big items from the ongoing sampling:
1)-EC2, even by this simple measure is currently growing in number of sites with their primary domain on EC2 by over 100% CAGR. You say cloud computing hype? I say the only serious infrastructure growth story in town.
2)-Despite this huge growth of EC2 Rackspace’s cloud (not even including the more PaaS like Cloudsites, Rackspace is holding its own as the clear #2 in public cloud based hosting.
While I’ve always been cautious about the domain hosting dipstick on technology trends those two facts jump out from this data without much prodding. There are lots of interesting things going on in public clouds and domain hosting is just a small piece of the overall pie. I’ll stay tuned to further studies from Infinibase.
If I’m Rackspace I would start releasing the overall hours of cloud servers used on a monthly basis. It would be a huge PR boon, quoted nearly universally by the fact hungry cloud press.
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