December is already upon us! Following a small delay due to the days spent at the IGT2009 cloud conference, here are this month’s statistics on cloud usage among the web’s top sites.  The first post in the series describes methodology, data sets and caveats.

Snapshot for December 2009

Little seems to change in this chart from month to month, with Amazon firmly in the lead. The devil is in the details though. This month’s surprises are in the relative growth seen for each provider in the data set.

Monthly Growth

For the first time, Amazon EC2 falls strongly behind in month-to-month growth. All providers but OpSource exhibited significantly more movement. While OpSource’s sharp fall seems like big news, it probably really isn’t: since OpSource is small in our data set, its sampling error is higher.

Trends

Total cloud usage among the top 500k sites grew by 5.3% this month, continuing the upwards trend we’ve been seeing for the past five months.  Even if this month’s growth seems smaller than previously, let’s compare it to non-cloud providers. A quick count of four leading traditional web hosters – GoDaddy, The Planet, Dreamhost and Bluehost – indicates their combined share, while over 10x larger than the cloud providers above, grew by just 1.7% this month.

Further numbers can be found in Rackspace’s Q3 Financial Reports, published last month. Rackspace is one of the few companies in the field to roll out its cloud vs. traditional hosting revenues, providing the industry a rare insight. The results? Rackspace’s Q309 revenues for cloud were $15.3M, compared to $147.1M for managed hosting. Let’s dig deeper and calculate the quarterly growth: The Rackspace Cloud grew 17.5%, compared to 5.8% growth in managed hosting.

It’s not surprising that the relative size and growth we can see in Rackspace’s results are reminiscent of what we see in our own data. In the relatively saturated web hosting market, cloud computing still has much ground to cover, but it’s gaining significant momentum.