Snapshot for July 2010

Here are the results for this month. Welcome Linode.

The top pair continue their steady march forward with 13% and 19% growth for Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers respectively, as compared to the last report two months ago. Amazon EC2 is the first of our contenders to smash the 3000-site barrier.

Linode is this month’s surprise, jumping straight into third place. I was deliberating whether Linode should be included in the report. Following some lively discussions on Twitter, the consensus was that Linode looks like a duck and walks like a duck, even if it doesn’t bother quacking. (This, as opposed to some providers that work hard to market themselves cloud while they don’t really seem to be.)

Linode offer a rich feature set and have an outstanding reputation among their customer community. The last time I saw this picture it was Slicehost, who ended up being acquired by Rackspace to jumpstart their Cloud Servers offering. What does the future hold for Linode?

Trends

Uncovering Linode’s footprint in the historical data collected, we witness remarkable growth. Linode has grown by 270% over the past 11 months, more than any other of the providers tracked.

Alternative Data Sets

Last month we skipped a report due to a bug in the top site list published by Quantcast, which serves as the input for this research. This prompted me to consider other data sets that could also be used. So what would our results be like if we used another well-known source of top site rankings? I chose to take Alexa, a well-known source, for a spin and see what happens. Here’s what I found -

I was pleased to find the results do not differ greatly between the different sets. The overall rankings are preserved although some providers do exhibit some variation (particularly Rackspace, which loses over 20% when we use Alexa). Even if it is tempting to switch data sets, continuity is of grave importance for research like this one. The findings above do confirm that the standings are in the same ballpark even when viewed through a different lense. Hence I am happy to continue using Quantcast (well, unless last month’s issues pop up again!).

Next month marks a year since the first State of the Cloud. This milestone will serve as an opportunity to look back and see what progress and changes we’ve seen over the past year – as well as to take a guess at what the future may hold for this industry.

But first, this month’s figures -

Looking at this month’s trends, we find a relatively slow month for the cloud. Overall growth was just 1.7%. The largest month-to-month percentage growth goes to OpSource which grew by 11%. In terms of absolute size, Rackspace grew the most with 70 new sites. Amazon gained just 10 new sites this month.

Let’s take a look at cloud providers from another angle. We last did this back in February.

Our first conclusion: Amazon now controls more than 50% of cloud-hosted sites. The second conclusion: by this metric at least, the cloud race continues to be a two-horse race: Amazon and Rackspace together control 94%, and all the rest of the providers retain but a sliver of control.

Many of the smaller providers have had a weak month, some even showing up less this month in the sample than they did previously. Only Amazon and Rackspace continue to plough ahead with Amazon gaining 6% and Rackspace 3%.

Overall cloud growth this month is at 3.9% (=58% CAGR).

Snapshot for March 2010

Total Cloud Adoption

It’s easy to get caught up in the differences between each provider, so this time let’s try to zoom out for a moment. Last month I noted that all these providers combined still hold less than 1% of the sites surveyed. Well, this month that threshold was crossed. The cloud now constitutes 1.01% of our sample. There is plenty of room to grow…

This month UK-based FlexiScale joins the report. FlexiScale has been on the radar for a while, but due to the US-oriented nature of QuantCast’s data it was so under-represented that it was as invisible. Since then, FlexiScale’s footprint has expanded enough so as to make it reasonable to include it the report. It’s worth mentioning that FlexiScale is probably still under-represented, so its standings should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Snapshot for February 2010

This month I’m plotting the numbers both in the usual bar chart and also in pie chart format. The pie-chart really visualizes that there are two leagues here. it’s increasingly difficult to see anyone from the minor league crossing over to the major league, which holds a whopping 93% of the total cloud-hosted sites found. Amazon EC2 hosts a shade under 50% of these sites while Rackspace Cloud Servers hosts 43%. Joyent, GoGrid, OpSource and FlexiScale together comprise just 7% of all cloud-hosted sites found.

I should remind readers that these percentages are not of the full 500,000 sites surveyed. In fact, all the cloud providers together still host a meager 1% of the sample.

Trends

Here are the results as observed over the past months:

Tune in next month for further updates!

Snapshot for January 2010

The standings continue to be stable. Has Amazon won or are we in for surprises during 2010?

Trends

The cloud marches forward! The past two months have been slower than usual (4-5% overall growth). On the one hand the cloud may have come in useful to handle the holiday traffic spikes, but on the other hand who wants to rock the boat at the most important time of the year, and just before your staff head out for vacation?

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.

Old or New?

During my recent presentation at the IGT, I was asked whether there is any evidence to back up the belief that newcomers are embracing cloud infrastructure more than established companies. Before our regular monthly numbers, let’s take a shot at that question. The technique we’ll use is simple: take registration dates for domains in the State of the Cloud data set, and compare those of cloud-hosted sites to those of the general population. (The analysis was performed with a random sampling of each group.)

The difference is easily recognizable to the naked eye. While both groups have representation across the board, cloud-hosted sites tend to be much newer. Calculating the median of each group, the overall median year of registration in our data set is 2003, while that for cloud-hosted sites is 2005. These findings won’t come as news to anyone, but it’s great to let the numbers tell the story of the cloud’s early adopters.

And now for our regular programming -

Snapshot for November 2009

Amazon leaps ahead, this month attaining a 35% lead on runner up Rackspace Cloud Servers. I’d like to note that due to an update of Quantcast’s top million sites (the input data set), this month’s results may be “bumpier” than usual. In the grand scheme of things, these regular updates will contribute to greater accuracy.

Monthly Growth

GoGrid got the biggest boost this month, even though in absolute numbers there is a lot of ground to be covered. In the race for pole position, Amazon greatly outpaced Rackspace. We might infer that that the updated data set’s positive effect on GoGrid and Amazon EC2 reflects well on them: it is an indication of their true strength amongst the top of the crop of Internet sites, as compared to the other providers.

Trends

Regardless of the individual providers’ standings, the overall growth of the cloud providers surveyed over the past 3 months (as indicated by the black line) is an incredible 33% – from 3170 hits in our data set 3 months ago to 4217 this month.

Today I’m glad to be adding OpSource as the fifth provider compared in the report.  Originally, UK-based providers FlexiScale and ElasticHosts were planned for inclusion. However, the US-oriented nature of QuantCast’s rankings resulted in underrepresentation of their customer base (recall that QuantCast’s top site list is the data set for this research). At this point, they will be omitted from the report.

Snapshot for October 2009

No big surprises for us this month. Amazon EC2 continues to lead the pack with Rackspace Cloud Servers closely behind. Newcomer OpSource enters into fifth place with 19 hits from the sites sampled.

Monthly Growth

Last month, it was Amazon EC2 that outpaced the rest of the providers. This month, it was Rackspace which exhibited the fastest growth,  with over 10% since last month!

Trends

With more and more data to track, the major trends are beginning to take shape. The primary contenders continue to be Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers. It will no doubt be interesting to watch how the battle for the top spot unfolds over the coming months.

Please refer to the first post in the series for methodology, data sets and caveats.

To avoid confusion, the analysis will focus on cloud IaaS providers only. Currently tracked are Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers (Slicehost), Joyent and GoGrid. I’m inviting the community to comment below regarding providers you feel should (or shouldn’t) be included. I’ll also be digging deeper into the definition of an IaaS cloud in upcoming posts, so stay tuned.

Snapshot for September 2009

Of the 500k sites analyzed, these are the results for the IaaS providers tracked:

In terms of the standings themselves, no changes from last month. However, as we’ll explore further below, it appears Amazon EC2 is not only larger than its competitors, it’s also continuing to outpace them.

Monthly Growth

Let’s examine what has changed since last month:

Again we find Amazon EC2 in the lead, sustaining a growth rate of around 9% for the second consecutive month. Whereas Amazon was just a step ahead of Rackspace in terms of its current size in our sample, in terms of growth it leads by a wide margin, shooting forward almost 3 times as fast as Rackspace. Joyent disappointed this month with a net loss.

Trends

This month, we have enough data to begin examining the trends. (Please note that the first research examined EC2 only, hence it’s the only provider with 3 data points.)

Amazon EC2’s rapid growth is becoming clearly visible. Extrapolating back in time, we can estimate that EC2 overtook Rackspace sometime between June and July. Can Amazon keep up this trend? I’ll be following closely!

Notable Comers and Goers

Among the hundreds of changes this month, here are some that piqued my attention:

• Vogue UK left Conde Nast’s own network and is now running in Amazon EC2’s European region. Is Conde Nast outsourcing its IT into the cloud?
• Popular Spanish Dictionary site spanishdict.com left Amazon EC2 for SoftLayer. (It’s unknown whether this was to SoftLayer’s cloud service or to a traditional hosting environment.)
• Twitter-based apps twtpoll and twtvite switched to Joyent over from Rackspace’s traditional hosting.
• Pamela Anderson’s official site, which is set to relaunch this month, has left Joyent.
• West Liberty University migrated its website from local West Virginia company CityNet over to GoGrid.