SA dominates web hosting in Africa

South Africa and Egypt together account for 80 of the top 100 websites hosted in Africa, according to a recent report from Pingdom, a company that focuses on uptime monitoring.

However, although 34 countries in Africa host one or more sites that rank in the top million globally, only 2,670 (or 0.27%) of the world’s top million sites are hosted in Africa.

Of these, South African accounts for over 69% (1,852) of the sites in the top million, with Egypt in second place at over 10% (276).

Out of the world’s top 10,000 sites, only 33 are hosted in Africa, and among the top 100,000 sites, 250 are hosted in Africa.

Pingdom explained that the data was collected from 6–8 June 2012, with a script developed in-house that scanned 945,472 out of Alexa’s top 1 million sites. The remaining sites failed for various reasons.

The top 100 sites hosted in Africa were identified and each of those sites were checked again before publication, Pingdom said.

In the blog post detailing their results, Pingdom pointed out that web hosting is a “constantly moving target” and the location from where a particular site is hosted may have changed by the time of publication.

The following graph from Pingdom shows the breakdown of where you can find the top 100 sites hosted in Africa.

Top 100 websites hosted in Africa (countries) – Pingdom

A subset of Pingdom’s table of the top 100 websites hosted in Africa is reproduced below, showing the top 20. The full table can be found on the “Royal Pingdom” blog.

Related articles

Shocking claims about online radio in SA

NetDynamix hits back in online radio debacle

Who rules SA’s online space?

Top 10 South African mobile websites

Beware leaving out that pesky www