Web Hosting Statistics 2025: New Survey Reveals Americans Are Confused About Hosting, But Price Drives Every Decision
All About Cookies compiled data from leading market research firms and hosting platforms to understand global web hosting trends, including provider market share, pricing, and consumer preferences.
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Web hosting is the foundation of the internet. Every website relies on a hosting provider to store files and make its pages available online. Today, the web hosting market supports over a billion websites and continues to grow rapidly worldwide. So far for 2025, the web hosting market is worth $194 billion and expected to grow to $362 billion by 2030.
In this report, All About Cookies combines global market estimates with new survey data to highlight hosting trends and consumer experiences. Our findings show how the market is shifting, how Americans understand hosting, and what users can expect to pay for hosting.
Majority of Americans (72%) only have a vague idea of what web hosting is, with only 13% of Americans saying they understand the term “web hosting” completely.
Price drives nearly every hosting decision. 80% of users listed cost as a top factor when selecting a provider. Ease of setup (46%) and security (39%) follow.
Roughly six in ten Americans expect hosting to cost no more than $25 per month, and only 10% expect costs above $50.
Small businesses take a hands-on approach to hosting. 72% manage their own hosting account, and 65% built their business website themselves.
Most Americans only have a vague idea of what web hosting is
In our survey, 40% of respondents said they have a general idea of what web hosting is, while nearly 1 in 4 (24%) said they didn’t know what the term refers to. Just 13% reported a complete understanding of web hosting.
When asked what a web host does, most respondents correctly identified core functions such as storing files or managing domains (63%), but over 1 in 5 confused hosting with design, email, or security features.
Most Americans rely on reviews, research when selecting a web hosting service
Only 26% of respondents said they had purchased or managed a hosting plan. Of those, the majority (56%) said they chose their provider based on online research or reviews. A smaller share of responses cited receiving hosting services through a website builder such as Wix or Squarespace (16%) or via a recommendation from a friend or colleague (15%).
Users prioritize price, ease of setup when selecting a web hosting service provider
Price is the primary driving factor in hosting provider decisions. Eight in 10 respondents cited web hosting cost as the most important factor. Ease of setup, and security and backups follow (46% and 39%, respectively). Brand reputation was the least important factor (14%).
1 in 3 Americans have tried to build a website
Access to web building tools drives website creation today over technical knowledge.
Even though just 19% of respondents said they know how to code, roughly one in three (32%) have tried to build a website. And most did not start with development tools: approximately three in four used drag-and-drop builders such as Wix or Squarespace.
Web hosting market share
As of November 2025, Shopify has the largest market share, just edging out Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hostinger and Wix follow, according to W3Techs. Over the past year, AWS and Newfold Digital Group (owners of Bluehost and HostGator) have seen declines in their market share, while Hostinger has the highest growth.
While Hostinger currently has the third-highest market share, it is also the fastest-growing provider (since October 2025), with a daily increase of 32.5 million sites — double the next fastest provider, Vercel (daily increase of 16.2 million sites). Wix follows with 14.2 million sites.
Rank
Web Hosting Provider
Daily Increase in No. of Sites
1
Hostinger
32.5 million
2
Vercel
16.2 million
3
Wix
14.2 million
Types of web hosting services and their popularity
There are four primary types of web hosting: shared, virtual private server (VPS), dedicated, and cloud.
Shared web hosting: Multiple websites share one physical server and resources like CPU, RAM, storage, etc. It is popular for entry-level websites — such as personal sites, blogs, and local businesses — to start with shared hosting.
Virtual private server (VPS): Hosting on a physical server that has been divided into virtual machines. Users are given dedicated portions of the system’s resources. This is more of a mid-tier option for developers, sites with medium-volume traffic, or users with growing business sites.
Cloud hosting: A website is hosted across a network of servers. It’s a strong option for websites that need scalability, redundancy, geographic distribution, and uptime guarantees, such as ecommerce, SaaS, and enterprise systems.
Dedicated hosting: User leases an entire physical server with full access. This option is well-suited for sites that rely primarily on stable performance or have compliance-heavy workloads, such as businesses that need complete control over their security policies, server configurations, or hardware performance.
Largest market share
Shared web hosting (38%)
Largest market revenue
Cloud hosting (61%)
Fastest growing
Cloud hosting (18% CAGR*)
*Compound Annual Growth Rate
Web hosting in small business
Our survey revealed that most small businesses manage their online presence in-house. 35% said their company had a website, while 10% said it was in progress. Among those, 72% manage their own hosting, and nearly two-thirds of small business owners built it themselves.
Web hosting priorities in small business
When choosing a web host, the top three priorities for small business owners are price (72%), ease of use (45%), and speed or performance (34%). Reputation and reviews were the seventh-most important factor (16%), while scalability also ranked lower (7%).
How much do small businesses pay for web hosting?
Small businesses reported paying a variety of prices for their business websites. The largest portion (27%) said they spend $50 to $100 per year on web hosting, followed by 23% who pay $250 or more. An equal share of respondents pay less than $50 or between $250 to $500 annually (18%).
How to start hosting your own website
Web hosting can seem complicated, but the right tools make it easy.
With traffic climbing and cyberthreats escalating, our team wanted to examine the current realities of web hosting. We had experts weigh in about today’s security challenges, the fallout of data breaches, and AI’s growing role. Here’s what they had to say:
What are the biggest security challenges that hosting providers are facing in 2025?
Hosting providers face increasingly sophisticated AI-driven attacks that automate vulnerability discovery, credential theft, and large-scale exploitation. These attacks evolve rapidly and frequently target cloud infrastructures, forcing providers to defend systems that are both distributed and highly dynamic.
Another significant challenge lies in maintaining secure configurations within complex cloud architectures. The large-scale AWS outage in October 2025 illustrated how a single failure or misconfiguration can cascade across global systems, underscoring the vulnerability of modern cloud environments and the need for stronger resilience and security controls.
Security challenges are common, yet
unhandled security vulnerabilities are not new in 2025. In general, most
of the failures fall within operational challenges (e.g., mishandled
configurations, missing security controls), as well as software supply
chain challenges (i.e., people poison the software supply to attack web
hosts). I have personally evidenced this, but it has also been recorded
on OWASP's top 10 draft for November.
However, attackers will always try to add some freshness to the equation.
With AI so in vogue, attackers are using mostly a combination of: 1) AI-
enabled payloads in their attacks (e.g., to help with exfiltration or
persistent access), and 2) slopsquatting (i.e., when attackers guess
hallucinated supply chain vectors to attack possible vibe coders). These
are not exactly new vectors, but small tweaks that attackers use to lean
on newer, hotter technologies.
Something to note is that this means that defenses mostly stay the same.
If you want to avoid these two new quirks, defenders can still apply
good policy management, add missing security controls, and apply good
software supply chain practices as proposed by various industry
standards (e.g., NIST 800-204D, CIS supply chain security guide,
P-SSCRM, or Microsoft's S2C2F).
When a web host is compromised, what are the legal and privacy implications for consumers whose personal data is stored on those servers?
When a hosting provider is breached and personal data is exposed, the provider, and often the businesses using its services, can face strict obligations under privacy laws such as GDPR, CPRA, or other regional regulations. These typically require timely notification to affected individuals and regulatory authorities, detailed incident reporting, and corrective measures to prevent recurrence. Failure to demonstrate adequate security controls may result in fines, audits, or other enforcement actions.
For consumers, a compromise can lead to identity theft, financial loss, and long-term privacy risks, which may prompt civil litigation or class-action lawsuits. Even when contracts limit liability, providers may still be held responsible if negligence is demonstrated. Organizations hosting regulated data, such as healthcare or financial information, face additional sector-specific requirements and penalties, making breach remediation particularly complex.
This is changing quite a bit. The most activity I've heard is from the
looming case of the European Union's CRA, which will change liability
when software is compromised. In particular, it changes the
relationship between platform and service providers and the software
supply chain actors. For example, if there is a compromise on a web
host, and the software involved was not securely vetted, the web host
is liable for this lack of due diligence (I won't bother you with
quantities, but rest assured that this is substantial enough to be a
strong deterrent).
In practice, this means that various web host providers need to change
their risk equation, which in turn will have ramifications in how
vulnerabilities are prioritized. Further, even if this
legislation is only directly affecting the EU, this does not mean this
will not affect consumers worldwide --- take a second to reflect what
your relationship has been to cookies once GDPR was passed.
With regard to a compromise, as a consumer today, ramifications are
substantial. If a web server is logging things like user-agent data, as
well as IPs, and other client information, this may be enough to
uniquely identify an individual connecting to a website. While this is
often used in seemingly benign ways (e.g., for advertisement), this can
also be exploited to affect users' privacy substantially. In practice,
our digital fingerprint is quite unique, and with advances in computer
and machine learning, we can rest assured that identifying us is not
that difficult, given that our computers are quite chatty (e.g., they
may happily share the size of the screen we are using or if we are
logged into Facebook).
Putting it all together, there's a "push and pull" for the legal
consequences of host compromise. On one hand, governments are getting
stricter with the way hosts handle their operations (i.e., liability).
On the other hand, the fact that data stored in such servers can be
increasingly used to deanonymize us in interesting ways makes a
compromise more likely to affect us (i.e., impact). In short, the stakes
are getting higher.
In what ways will AI change the web hosting industry?
On the positive side, AI will substantially reshape hosting operations by enabling intelligent automation of infrastructure management. Advanced AI-driven security tools will enhance intrusion detection, accelerate incident response, and identify emerging threats far earlier than traditional monitoring methods.
On the negative side, a May 2025 Graphite report noted that more than half of all online written content is now AI-generated. Some experts predict that by 2026, as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by AI. This shift raises significant concerns about content authenticity, misinformation at scale, and the growing difficulty of distinguishing legitimate information from misleading or malicious material.
I see this as AI is becoming a "variance amplifier." Some aspects will
be harder to affect (e.g., because developers and sysadmins are using AI
to aid in activities), yet some areas will be hardly affected (i.e.,
because attackers are using AI). This is to say that the balance
remains the same, but the overarching elements are shuffling quite
a bit. Following up from the above, it seems that areas where AI is still
quite fallible (i.e., operations), we are seeing more security gaps.
Methodology
All About Cookies surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults ages 18 or older using a survey platform in November 2025.
Data on web hosting market share provided by the following:
AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.
Josh Koebert is a seasoned data journalist whose work has appeared in top-tier outlets including CNET, PCMag, Forbes, TechCrunch, and a range of other respected media platforms. His work explores topics relating to privacy, data security, and technology in an increasingly digital world.
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