Counting the server herd

Which web hosting companies and related businesses operate the largest number of servers? Rackspace announced they had hit the 50,000 mark recently, and DatacenterKnowledge took the opportunity to determine who is in the same league. Three web hosting companies lead the pack: 1&1 Internet (55,000), Rackspace (50,038), and The Planet (48,500). They are followed by Akamai Technologies, OVH, SBC Communications, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and SoftLayer.

The study uses data from the Netcraft Server Count Report, which estimates the number of physical machines rather than simply count IPs. Rackspace, for example, has announced a larger number of computers than the actual web servers it has; this means a significant percentage of their hardware runs mail servers and database backends. The overall server numbers are also based on the companies' public earnings reports. These sources provide more realistic estimates of available resources, given that companies with few machines and high ratio of virtual servers per computer can easily reach a very large number of servers.

The study does not include the exact server-count of some of the biggest IT companies, which typically do not disclose such data. Some informed guesses, based on combined datacenter area and usage statistics, yield interesting numbers: Google and Amazon are believed to operate close to 500,000 computers each. In the case of Google, only one of its newest data centers hosts 45,000 computers. Microsoft runs somewhere in the 200,000-300,000 machines range, with a large new facility in Chicago expected to raise the number significantly.

According to an earlier study that we mentioned on the HostReview blog, datacenter expenditures are rising almost four times faster than overall IT costs, with virtualization and energy efficient tech becoming more important to operations.

Read the DatacenterKnowledge article here.