Comments on: Where does the web live? Surprisingly, Houston is a popular neighborhood

By: Jason Cardinal

Jason Cardinal — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:28:27 +0000

That’s not very meaningful if you are only counting the numbers of site in the first million. I bet you the traffic from the #1 site is more than a million time the 1millionth site.
It would be great if the study also showed the combined traffic in TB.

By: Frank Lee

Frank Lee — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:08:46 +0000

Yeah Hostgator is a middleman only.
Their data centers are located at Softlayer and Ace.
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/hosting-guide/hardware-software/hostgator-data-centers

By: Tory

Tory — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:28:01 +0000

Not sure how much an impact this would have, but HostGator is based in Houston, and I think they are one of the top hosting providers. San Antonio would be RackSpace.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:34:48 +0000

If you take the SF Bay Area as a whole with all it’s little cities, you will see the Top 100 list includes Mountain View, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Newark (though that could be New Jersey rather than California), and Palo Alto. That total would be close or surpass Houston.
Though I admit I’m not as familiar with the suburbs around Houston which itself is a huge city.
Phoenix/Scottsdale, Los Angeles, and Washington DC might rank a little higher too if you combine some of the cities within those metropolitan areas together.

By: Simon West

Simon West — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:16:21 +0000

SoftLayer (full disclosure: I’m the CMO) operates two data centers in Houston and six in Dallas, which account for a significant portion of this data – see http://factspy.net/where-are-the-top-100000-websites-hosted-infographic/ for a breakdown of the Alexa data for the top 100,000 sites from November 2012 by service provider as well as city.

By: Madlyb

Madlyb — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:13:37 +0000

Top 1 million?! Sounds like a lot of noise in that sample space.

I would look at how the top 25 shuffle as you move from 1 million to 100K to 10K and to 1K and that should give you a clearer picture.

You could also break them out by sector and that might align with @Henry Hwong’s comment about corporate sites.

By: Henry Hwong

Henry Hwong — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:57:19 +0000

1. There may be a lot of sites hosted in the Bay Area, but how many of them are from emerging startups with low-traffic sites?

2. I assume a site is a site is a site with Alexa. Even if Google.com and Facebook.com get a ton of traffic, they still only count as one each.

3. Houston has one of the largest (if not the largest) number of companies on the Fortune 500.

By: Sam Scott

Sam Scott — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:45:43 +0000

Energy exploration and production is very data intensive and the data is extremely proprietary. So think of several hundred firms managing and transmitting petabytes of seismic models, drilling telemetry and manufacturing designs; Data so sensitive and real-time that is cannot be trusted to anyone else’s cloud. That’s what we do in Houston.