20.48% of Irish Websites On 10 IP addresses

Just over 20% of Irish websites are on 10 IP addresses. The number of Irish websites covered in the survey was 257695. There were only 20959 distinct IP addresses. The WhoisIreland.com survey of Irish websites runs every month and covers   .ie websites and Irish hosted com/net/org/biz/info/eu websites.  The concentration of websites on a small number of IPs  is due to the success of  the shared hosting model. It also provides an insight into how the Irish web hosting market is maturing.

For most businesses, shared web hosting is fine. Their sites are not going to require vast resources and will never have hundreds of thousands of unique vistors a day hitting their website. Shared hosting is also somewhat cheaper for the hoster in that a large number of clients can be hosted on a small number of servers. The option of dedicated hosting always exists for those businesses that need the power that a dedicated server provides. Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosting falls between the two. It has the features of dedicated hosting and is closer to the costs of shared hosting.

The concentration of websites on a small number of IP addresses is also an indication of a maturing market. An early web hosting market would have a higher number of distinct IP addresses because no clear market leaders would have emerged and it would be small and medium sized hosters having the bulk of the market share. As a web hosting market matures, a few top web hosting companies will emerge. In the early phases of the Irish webhosting market, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) dominated the market. Eircom.net and Esat. net held over 50% of the Irish web hosting market ten years ago. Their decline has been dramatic as second generation Hosting Service Providers effectively took over the Irish market. These second generation hosters were providing things that the old ISPs did not. They made web hosting simpler and cheaper. Eircom and Esat failed to capitalise on their market share and through a failure to adapt to the changes in the Irish web hosting market, they have continuously lost market share. The second generation hosters (Hosting365.ie (now Register365.ie) / Blacknight.com / Digiweb.ie / Novara.ie (now owned by Digiweb.ie) / Irishdomains.com) to a large extent replaced Eircom and Esat in the market. They did so by commoditising web hosting, doing it better and doing it cheaper.