# HostingBrain > Market intelligence on European web hosting — who owns it, what it charges, what runs on it — measured > across the whole active-domains book and a validated ownership ledger, delivered as an MCP connector so > analysts ask inside Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP client and get answers with as-of dates and denominators. ## Findings — analyst briefs (each reproducible through the connector) - [Analyst briefs](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/): short, data-grounded reads on hosting-market structure, each 100% reproducible through the MCP connector: - [The route checked out, it was still a forgery: a BGP hijack and RPKI](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/the-route-checked-out.html): The late-August hijack of Hetzner address space carried the victim's own ASN as origin, so it was RPKI-valid and origin validation had nothing to drop. ROA publication across the hosting estate is well advanced once the single largest announcer is set aside; ASPA publication is almost absent — only a handful of operators carry a verified publication at the path layer. Reproduce: email_security (free) for the mail-side parallel; the routing figures are from public RPKI/RIS data. - [The same word, leader, two floors down: who leads DNS in Europe](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/the-word-leader-two-floors-down.html): webhosting.today's Cloudflare finding corroborated and taken two floors down — brands folded into owners, who answers DNS separated from who operates hosting; every external figure attributed and dated, every our-side figure recomputed from the served dataset. - [European hosting groups measured: the Hosting Anatomy evidence](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/hosting-anatomy-evidence.html): the instrument readings behind the series — platform concentration, cohesion, own-network serving share — with the book and base of every figure named. - [Nobody left hosting, they left the bundle: hosting churn in Europe](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/hosting-stack-fragmented.html): hosting "churn" is often wallet fragmentation — front doors migrate quickly, trust (email, hosting) migrates slowly; builder platforms hold ~0% of the email relationship on the sites they serve (reproduce: stack_profile tool, free tier) - [Where the new websites are going: new-site hosting in Europe](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/new-site-momentum.html): once placeholder infrastructure and single-operator bulk events are screened out, traditional hosting still takes about seven in ten new European websites and is the one class giving up ground; that ground splits between two fronts of similar size, CDN/edge fronting and a growing visible hyperscaler origin - no hyperscaler takeover, about one new site in eight (reproduce: hosting_momentum tool, free tier) - [The server moves, the customer doesn't: hosting switching by layer](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/layer-stickiness.html): the provider relationship changes at ~12%/yr for European business domains; the serving layer moves without it at 0.15%/yr — the relationship is the atom of switching, and raw migration feeds overstate movement ~20x (reproduce: layer_stickiness tool, free tier) - [Whoever holds the domain holds the customer: hosting customer control](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/relationship-control.html): connective thesis over three tools — traditional hosting holds new EU sites (71.7% cohort vs 78.8% installed), provider relationship far stickier than the server (serving-move-with-stable-control 0.15%/yr), multi-domain owners consolidate (71.2% single-provider, 87.9% wallet, 98.9% single-brand); the prize is the control-plane relationship before SaaS/email/AI attach (reproduce: hosting_momentum + layer_stickiness + customer_faithfulness, all free) - [Hosting customers don't leave: provider loyalty in Europe](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/customer-faithfulness.html): provider share-of-wallet from the ownership graph — 71.2% of multi-domain owners are single-provider, cross-border barely dents it (68.7%), per-provider exclusivity spans 70.5-41.4% (book quality, not size); 98.9% of group-loyal owners sit within a single BRAND (conscious loyalty, not hidden-ownership artifact); measured on tracking-detected ownership to avoid the cert-host confound (reproduce: customer_faithfulness tool, free tier; per-provider = analyst) - [Europe checks the mail, nobody stops it: SPF and DMARC enforcement](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/spf-without-enforcement.html): 82% publish SPF on Europe's mail-carrying business domains, but only 29.1% reject-on-fail, and just 9.6% back it with a DMARC reject policy. Enforcement inverts the adoption league table (Poland/Sweden enforce; Italy/Germany publish). Reproduce: email_security (free). - [Half the domains have no website: registry stock vs market size](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/domain-market-vs-hosting-market.html): web-provisioned share of 15 official registry totals runs 49.5% (.de) to 78.7% (.fi); the gap is never-web-provisioned registrar stock — between a fifth and a half of registered stock, varying by country, so registry totals overstate the addressable market everywhere. Reproduce: coverage_calibration (free). - [Who really owns Europe's hosting: market share and concentration](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/market-concentration.html): concentration is three questions on three actor bases; the market-POWER reading is actor-pure (hosting competitors only, CDN/SaaS/DNS-infrastructure actors excluded) — hosting-relationship HHI Norway 3,393 / Denmark 2,596 / France 2,002 / Sweden 1,925 against the Netherlands 432, while for Europe as one book the control-plane reading is 369. Consolidation is national, and the customer relationship concentrates ahead of the infrastructure (Norway ~3 effective owners vs ~8.8 effective infrastructures) (reproduce: market_concentration tool, free tier; snapshot 2026-09-20) - [Cheap first year, then three times the price: hosting renewal cliffs in Europe](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/renewal-cliff.html): 2022 offers state both intro and renewal price - 90.4% renew higher, median shared-hosting cliff 3.0x, pricing baseline 2026-09-24; the norm is national (from about 2x in the UK to over 4x in Denmark), and the deepest teasers sit on consolidator storefronts in roughly the consolidators' share of the book (reproduce: market_pricing tool, free tier) - [Three ways to sell a domain: business models in hosting](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/hostings-second-act.html): "hosting" now conceals three models — GoDaddy monetises the domain funnel (customers flat, ARPU +9%), IONOS pairs web presence with sovereign European cloud, and Europe's consolidators are becoming SMB-software buyers (19 of team.blue's 34 validated acquisitions are software). The books are not comparable: active-domains footprints 18.5M (GoDaddy) vs 3.28M/1.97M/1.39M/0.99M (United Internet/IONOS, team.blue, group.one, Your.Online), and measured acquisition integration spans 0.68 to 0.08 — an external test of every platform story (reproduce: consolidation_landscape + saas_diversification + integration_depth, free/analyst; snapshot 2026-07-26) - [The AI web is one company: AI website builders in Europe](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/ai-website-builders-europe.html): across the thirteen European markets we publish, 9,811 of 5,558,504 active domains showing a homepage or shop page carry an AI website builder — 0.177% of that book — against 389,385 (7.0%) on conventional hosted builders, 39.7 times as many, and 3,028,991 (54.5%) on WordPress. Restrict the book to the 1,852,937 domains re-read since 24 July (33.3% of it) and the AI share is 0.25%, so the gap is not an artefact of when we looked. The category is one product: Lovable is 8,284 of the 9,811 detections (84.4%), and 67.1% of the 4,638 detections on that re-read cohort, where every product has had the same observation window — both readings are published. Detection is a marker in the page, so every AI figure is a floor (reproduce: technology_adoption, category totals free and the per-product breakdown Pro; definitions(term='technology_adoption') free; snapshot 2026-09-06) - [Buy first, integrate never: acquired brands in European hosting](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/integration-backlog.html): across nine European groups that run a shared platform, 57 of 87 acquired brands have their customers served from a group platform and 23 do not, two or more years after the deal — 1,266,388 live domains. 21 of the 23 have moved nothing at all (median 49 months since the deal, 20 of them under 5% migrated); the other two moved mail only. All seven owners carrying one announced further acquisitions afterwards, 78 validated deals, while 0.47%-22.33% of their own books moved between platforms they already control. Aggregate-level: the brief names no group (reproduce: integration_depth + group_movement, both Pro; definitions(term='integration_depth') free; snapshot 2026-08-09) - [Three buyers, half the software deals: European hosting acquisitions](https://hostingbrain.ai/briefs/hosting-groups-software-shift.html): the up-stack shift is concentrated, not general — 75 of 262 validated acquisitions and mergers by 22 consolidator groups took a software or adjacent target, and three buyers (team.blue, group.one, cyber_Folks) account for 38 of those 75. Of the 14 groups with five or more validated deals, three have made no non-hosting acquisition at all, including hosting.com at 23 deals and none. The record is a validated floor built from primary announcements, and a deal count says nothing about whether an acquired product was ever sold to a hosting customer — that is a billing fact and billing is private (reproduce: saas_diversification + consolidation_landscape, both Pro; definitions(group='ownership') free; snapshot 2026-08-03) ## Markets — one page per country - [European hosting market share, by country](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/): one page per market — market share, concentration, market size, email posture and the LOCAL search vocabulary buyers use; aggregate-level, denominator-stated, every figure reproducible through the connector: (concentration is quoted as hosting-relationship HHI — ACTOR-PURE, hosting competitors only, CDN/SaaS/ DNS-infrastructure actors excluded — which is the market-POWER reading; the infrastructure figure beside it counts where workloads run, and the two are never the same question) - [Norway hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/no.html): the most concentrated market we publish — hosting-relationship HHI 3,393 (highly concentrated), ~2.9 effective owners holding 80.7% of relationships in the top three, against ~8.8 effective infrastructures; 394,415 live business domains; buyers search 'webhotell'/'domene' (reproduce: market_concentration, market_digitization, email_security — free tier) - [Denmark hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/dk.html): hosting-relationship HHI 2,596 (highly concentrated), ~3.9 effective owners against ~5.5 effective infrastructures; 5 of 11 tracked storefronts display a flat price yet the median measured renewal cliff is 5.0x, and weighting storefronts by the customer relationships each serves the renewal the average Danish customer meets is 4.5x the first year; storefronts serving 93.6% of captured relationships publish a second-year price we can read against the first; 501,987 live business domains; buyers search 'webhotel'/'hosting' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / email_security — free tier) - [France hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/fr.html): thin ownership, contested acquisition — hosting-relationship HHI 2,002 (moderately concentrated), ~5 effective owners against ~6.4 effective infrastructures, the largest single control-plane actor at 34.4% of the book; at least 5 ownership groups hold page-one positions on the hosting terms we track there, 90% of 10 tracked storefronts acquire on teaser pricing and storefronts serving 60.1% of captured relationships publish a renewal price; 2,054,543 live business domains; buyers search 'hébergement'/'hébergeur' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / search_visibility — free tier) - [Sweden hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/se.html): ownership roughly halves effective competition — hosting-relationship HHI 1,925 (moderately concentrated), ~5.2 effective owners against ~10.5 effective infrastructures; 667,834 live business domains; buyers search 'webbhotell'/'domän' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_digitization / email_security — free tier) - [Italy hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/it.html): commerce ahead of controls — hosting-relationship HHI 1,678 (moderately concentrated, just across the 1,500 moderate line), ~6 effective owners against ~6.8 effective infrastructures; e-commerce tooling on 37.3% of fingerprinted sites and a detectable CMS on 67.0%, both the highest we publish, while only 1.9% of mail-carrying Italian domains publish a DMARC policy that rejects forged mail — the lowest we publish — and 52.4% publish monitoring-only p=none; 1,567,973 live business domains; buyers search 'hosting'/'domini' — the English word is the door, the market behind it is Italian (reproduce: market_concentration / technology_adoption / email_security — free tier) - [United Kingdom hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/uk.html): a platform market — hosting-relationship HHI 1,881 (moderately concentrated on hosting competitors only), ~5.3 effective owners, but the infrastructure-inclusive control-plane reading makes the field look 1.4x more plural than the hosting competition is (the widest such wedge we publish); website-builder software detected on 16.8% of measured sites, about four times the median of our other markets; 3,707,722 live business domains; pricing coverage is 17.0% so NO market price or renewal cliff is stated; buyers search 'web hosting'/'domain names' (reproduce: market_concentration / technology_adoption / search_visibility — free tier) - [Germany hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/de.html): Europe's largest and genuinely contested — hosting-relationship HHI 1,293 (unconcentrated), ~7.7 effective owners against ~12.9 effective infrastructures; EUR0.84/mo entry for the average customer and a 6.5x median renewal cliff; 5,249,453 live business domains; buyers search 'webhosting'/'hosting' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / email_security — free) - [Czechia hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/cz.html): open ownership, sold on the first year — hosting-relationship HHI 1,014 (unconcentrated), ~9.9 effective owners against ~15.6 effective infrastructures and no actor above 20.7%; at least 5 of 8 tracked Czech storefronts acquire on teaser pricing, share-weighted entry EUR1.97/mo ex-VAT, and storefronts serving 41.2% of captured relationships publish a renewal price; 690,574 live business domains; buyers search 'webhosting'/'domén' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / email_security — free tier) - [Poland hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/pl.html): an acquisition market — hosting-relationship HHI 792 (unconcentrated), ~12.6 effective owners against ~17.1 effective infrastructures; 11 of 13 tracked storefronts use teaser mechanics, share-weighted entry EUR0.74/mo ex-VAT and storefronts serving only 85.9% of captured relationships publish a renewal price; 1,072,756 live business domains; buyers search 'hosting'/'domen' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / email_security — free tier) - [Finland hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/fi.html): fragmented ownership, thin priced coverage — hosting-relationship HHI 826 (unconcentrated), ~12.1 effective owners against ~14.5 effective infrastructures; the 10 tracked storefronts cover only 40.0% of customer relationships, and weighting them by the businesses each serves moves entry from EUR3.12 to EUR3.90/mo — the larger operators price ABOVE the storefront median; 316,063 live business domains; buyers search 'webhotelli'/'verkkotunnus', and at least 3 tracked ownership groups hold page-one positions through 5 different local brands (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / search_visibility — free tier) - [Switzerland hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/ch.html): premium pricing without concentration — hosting-relationship HHI 637 (unconcentrated), ~15.7 effective owners against ~14 effective infrastructures; share-weighted entry EUR11.55/mo ex-VAT against an EUR7.36 storefront median (the highest we publish), storefronts covering just 30.5% of captured relationships state a renewal price, and 34.5% of mail-carrying domains publish a DMARC policy that enforces — rejects or quarantines forged mail — the highest we publish; 1,117,275 live business domains; no national search vocabulary is published — the Swiss storefronts we capture all sell in German while the country buys in German, French and Italian (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / email_security — free tier) - [Spain hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/es.html): disclosed repricing — hosting-relationship HHI 500 (unconcentrated), ~20 effective owners against ~16.4 effective infrastructures (the customer book is spread across MORE owners than infrastructures); 94% of 16 tracked storefronts acquire on teaser pricing, median measured renewal cliff 4.5x, and storefronts serving 96.7% of captured relationships publish the renewal price, so the step up is advertised rather than discovered; 794,245 live business domains; buyers search 'alojamiento'/'hosting' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / email_security — free tier) - [Netherlands hosting market](https://hostingbrain.ai/markets/nl.html): the most open market we publish — hosting-relationship HHI 432 (unconcentrated, hosting competitors only), ~23.1 effective owners against ~25.6 effective infrastructures, so counting owners barely thins it; 81% of tracked storefronts still acquire on teaser pricing, median measured renewal cliff 8.0x; 2,336,280 live business domains; buyers search 'webhosting'/'hosting' (reproduce: market_concentration / market_pricing / email_security — free) - [Get a free key](https://hostingbrain.ai/#access): instant self-serve free tier; Pro (EUR 149/month) and Analyst (EUR 1,200/month) are monthly subscriptions, cancel any time; the Deal Workspace (EUR 8,500/transaction) is by request - [MCP endpoint](https://mcp.hostingbrain.ai/mcp): Streamable HTTP with OAuth 2.1 or bearer key — built on the open MCP standard, so it works in Claude, ChatGPT (Plus/Pro developer-mode connectors), Claude Code, Cursor and any MCP-compatible client; add as a custom connector, or find `ai.hostingbrain/intelligence` on the MCP Registry - [Service health](https://mcp.hostingbrain.ai/health): public status endpoint ## About HostingBrain and how it measures HostingBrain continuously observes the web-provisioned domain population (335M+ web-provisioned domains globally, 201M+ web-active, 141M+ active domains — a domain classification, not a company or legal-entity count — verified activity: operating email, live web content or platform provisioning; weekly refresh, calibrated against public registry totals such as Norid and SIDN. Web-active is the "verified web-serving" definition (updated 2026-07-18, not comparable to earlier published values): positive evidence only, including residence on infrastructure proven by the confirmed businesses it carries; the unverifiable remainder is disclosed, not counted). Population baseline dated 2026-09-27. and maintains a validated, source-linked ledger of 291 hosting-industry events — 263 validated acquisitions and mergers, plus 28 other tracked entries (divestitures, rebrands, portfolio enumerations) — including the sector's diversification into SaaS. Coverage: provider market structure per European country (control-plane — who runs the nameservers — plus hosting, email, web-platform layers), consolidator groups (team.blue, group.one, your.online, united_internet, IONOS, GoDaddy, Newfold, Miss Group, World Host Group, cyber_folks, Tucows, iomart and others), operator dossiers with ownership evidence, M&A market mapping, and book-health analysis. Research confidentiality: customer query subjects are never visible to other customers and never sold. All intelligence is lawful public-source (OSINT): DNS, HTTP, TLS, public registry-scale signals, and source-linked public M&A records — no private customer data, credentialed access, leaked data or intrusive scanning, and nothing appended from personal contact or consumer-profile sources. HostingBrain started in 2025 as an internal research project observing Europe's web-provisioned domain population, and powered private analyst briefings on hosting M&A before opening external access in 2026. It was built AI-native (an MCP connector rather than a BI dashboard) because the analysts it serves already work inside AI assistants. As part of external opening, the project has been spun out into HostingBrain ApS (CVR 46679091, Denmark). ## Documentation - [Homepage](https://hostingbrain.ai/): what HostingBrain answers, example product output and setup instructions - [Platform](https://hostingbrain.ai/platform.html): the analytical modules (market structure, operator dossiers, consolidation, integration depth, pricing, technology/attach, book quality) and delivery modes (AI-assistant connector, dossiers, API/scheduled delivery, custom datasets) - [Solutions](https://hostingbrain.ai/solutions/): workflow pages per buyer — [vendors and partners](https://hostingbrain.ai/solutions/vendors.html) (channel sizing and attach whitespace), [hosting operators](https://hostingbrain.ai/solutions/operators.html) (benchmarking, integration, pricing posture), [investors and advisors](https://hostingbrain.ai/solutions/investors-advisors.html) (market research for transactions and the Deal Workspace; research, not investment advice) - [Data and methodology](https://hostingbrain.ai/data-methodology.html): population definitions (web-provisioned / web-active / active domains), market layers, public sources, what HostingBrain does not claim, and the versioned-release policy - [European web hosting statistics](https://hostingbrain.ai/european-web-hosting-statistics.html): the citation page — domain populations by tier, hosting market share and concentration for every market listed under /markets/, website technology and email-authentication adoption each stated with the base it is measured on, and consolidation counts from a validated ownership ledger. Every figure is an observation of the live web carrying its population and its data-snapshot date; no revenue market size and no growth forecast are published, because neither is observable from the web - [Pricing](https://hostingbrain.ai/pricing.html): Explore (free), Pro (EUR 149/month), Analyst (EUR 1,200/month), Deal Workspace (EUR 8,500/transaction); Pro and Analyst are monthly subscriptions, cancel any time; the Deal Workspace is by request - [Sample dossier](https://hostingbrain.ai/sample-dossier.html): what an operator dossier contains, shown on a clearly-labelled composite archetype with real aggregate ranges - [About](https://hostingbrain.ai/about.html): why the company exists and how data quality is reviewed - [Contact / walkthrough](https://hostingbrain.ai/contact.html): question-first walkthrough booking - [Security overview](https://hostingbrain.ai/security.html): architecture, authentication, data protection — the vendor-review one-pager - [Terms of service](https://hostingbrain.ai/tos.html): acceptable use, extraction limits, research confidentiality - [Privacy policy](https://hostingbrain.ai/privacy.html): GDPR basis, data categories, objection route