Pingdom Looks At Onshore Web Hosting Stats
When doing your cheap hosting comparison prior to choosing a cheap hosting plan, are you picky about the country in which your website will be hosted? Pingdom, the same website that wondered where the top million sites worldwide were hosted, wanted to know how many people prefer going with a company in their own country rather than supporting the economy of another country. 
Onshore Web Hosting
Soon after Pingdom's last study was released revealing that 42 percent of the top million sites worldwide are hosted in the United States, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and development in Paris contacted them with another idea for a study. Their request: figure out how many of those top million sites with certain ccTLDs are hosted in the country associated with that ccTLD and determine where onshore hosting is the most common.
Pingdom Looks At Onshore Web Hosting Stats: Results
The top ten countries relying on onshore hosting are as follows, when looking at the top million sites in each of the ccTLDs:
- South Korea: 97%
- Vietnam: 93%
- Germany: 92%
- Japan: 91%
- Czech Republic: 90%
- Lithuania: 88%
- Bulgaria: 87%
- Thailand: 85%
- Kyrgyzstan: 84%
- Hungary: 84%
Pingdom points out that Japan and Germany are also in the top 10 list of ccTLDs that have the most sites in the top million sites overall. Additionally, Comoros, North Korea, and Swaziland aren't counted in this study although they have 100 percent of their sites hosted within their country. Why? The countries only have 1, 3, and 2 sites in total respectively!
What about the opposite, countries that do not ever rely on onshore hosting? 65 countries in all make up this list. The top three: Tuvalu (3,387 sites), Montenegro (2,260 sites), and Cocos Islands (1,607 sites).
How Did They Conduct This Study?
Taking the Alexa top million website list and conducting a scan of them regarding where they are hosted, they scanned a total of 947,461 sites. That list was pared down by removing every gTLD, including .com. They also took sites with no identifiable country or TLD off the list. This leaves the ccTLD sites.
After reading through the process, you can see why the United States is nowhere on the country list. There were only a few sites that used the .us domain.
But why did they decide to take out the .coms? They felt that although it would have meant more sites to study, the results wouldn't have been as reliable. When all was said and done and sites were removed from the list that helped compile the data, 309,129 sites were scrutinized in over 230 countries.
Is Onshore Web Hosting Something To Worry About?
So you're reading this, in the middle of the cheap hosting comparison process, wondering if you should be worried about where your hosting provider is located.
Although the United States provides the most choice when it comes to web hosting providers, if you aren't in the US, you should probably look into a local hosting company. Why? There are many reasons: language barriers; access; payment in your own currency; and the big ones, performance and latency.
Could the numbers also show areas you might want to avoid a cheap hosting plan? Possibly. It's hard to say, but it's equally hard to explain why some of the countries had a smaller percentage of local sites (71 percent of sites with the ccTLD .se were actually hosted in Sweden).
Do you rely on a hosting provider in your own country to host your site? Why, or why not?
