Cloud hosting statistics 2026: what companies actually run
We checked 1,842,987 companies' public records to see who runs Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, Vercel and more, by size, industry and country, and who's gaining.
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Just under half of the companies we checked, 47%, show a public trace of a major cloud or hosting tool, and Cloudflare leads by a wide margin. Amazon Web Services is a distant second, while Vercel and Microsoft Azure are adding companies fastest after Cloudflare.
Key takeaways
- Cloudflare is the most common cloud and hosting tool by far. It appears at 83% of the companies that run any tool in this group.
- Amazon Web Services is a distant second by company count, but the giants dominate on revenue: Synergy Research Group found in 2025 that 63% of cloud infrastructure spending in the third quarter went to Amazon, Microsoft and Google combined.
- Vercel posted the second-largest net gain in companies over the last 90 days, behind only Cloudflare.
- Google Cloud was the one tool in the group that lost more companies than it gained over that same window.
- Startups lean on these tools hardest: 90% of the Y Combinator startups we checked run at least one.
- Cost is the sore spot. Managing cloud spend topped the list of cloud challenges in Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud survey, as reported by InfoWorld.
What is cloud hosting, and how many companies use it?
Cloud hosting covers any service that runs or delivers a company's website and applications from someone else's infrastructure, from a global network sitting in front of a site to a full public cloud. Below we define the group, count who uses it and set that count beside the size of the market.
What counts as cloud and hosting software?
In this article, cloud and hosting software means 10 tools that serve or run a company's public web presence. They fall into four rough camps:
- Hyperscale clouds: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which sell computing, storage and databases on demand.
- Edge network: Cloudflare, which runs a global network that delivers, secures and speeds up websites and apps.
- Developer platforms: Vercel, Netlify, Heroku and DigitalOcean, built for teams who want to ship without managing servers.
- Managed WordPress hosts: WP Engine and Kinsta.
Most cloud hosting statistics blur two audiences: site owners buying a hosting plan, and engineering teams buying raw infrastructure. Our data covers both, and the split shows clearly in who runs what.
What percentage of businesses use cloud hosting?
Just under half of the companies we checked show a public trace of one of these cloud and hosting tools. In our scans, 871,092 companies run at least one of them, which is 47% of every company we checked.
These are counts of companies with a direct public trace: a DNS record, a verified domain, a script or a custom domain pointing at the vendor. They are not market share or paying-customer counts, and one company can run several tools. A company that runs AWS only behind its firewall leaves no trace, so treat every rate here as a floor.
Surveys come at the question differently. Eurostat's 2026 release found that 52.7% of EU enterprises paid for cloud computing services in 2025, and 45.5% bought cloud-hosted database services, back-office work no website scan can see.
The chart ranks the 10 tools by how many companies run them, and Cloudflare's lead is the first thing you notice.
Companies with a public trace of each tool in our scans. A company can run more than one.
The table adds each tool's company count and its share of the whole group.
| Tool | Companies | Share | Size | Top industry | Started | Stopped |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 721,419 | 83% | 11–50 | IT Services | 6,591 | 656 | |
 Amazon Web Services | 146,473 | 17% | 11–50 | Software | 523 | 234 |
| 76,738 | 8.8% | 11–50 | IT Services | 446 | 575 | |
| 51,725 | 5.9% | 11–50 | Healthcare | 199 | 132 | |
| 50,730 | 5.8% | 11–50 | IT Services | 2,289 | 298 | |
| 48,277 | 5.5% | 11–50 | IT Services | 2,241 | 529 | |
| 13,111 | 1.5% | 11–50 | IT Services | 70 | 4 | |
| 11,916 | 1.4% | 11–50 | IT Services | 586 | 79 | |
| 7,351 | 0.8% | 11–50 | IT Services | 108 | 106 | |
| 3,006 | 0.3% | 11–50 | Software | 77 | 67 |
For anyone sizing a market, the pool of companies with a visible hosting footprint is huge, but it is concentrated in one vendor.
How big is the cloud hosting market?
The cloud infrastructure market runs to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Synergy Research Group put worldwide cloud infrastructure service revenues at $106.9 billion for the third quarter of 2025, covering IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud, and at $390 billion over the trailing twelve months.
Amazon alone reported $107.6 billion in AWS segment sales for full-year 2024, according to its fourth-quarter 2024 earnings release.
Revenue figures and company counts measure different things. Our counts weigh a ten-person agency the same as a global bank, while revenue tracks dollars spent. Read together, they show where the money sits and where the companies sit, which are not the same place.
Which cloud hosting providers are most popular?
Popularity depends on what you count. By number of companies, Cloudflare leads everything; by revenue, the three hyperscalers do. The specialists fill in the middle with very different audiences.
Why does Cloudflare lead by such a wide margin?
A likely reason is that Cloudflare sits in front of websites rather than replacing where they're hosted. A company can host on AWS, WP Engine or its own servers and still route traffic through Cloudflare's network, which would explain why Cloudflare turns up alongside every other camp. Our data shows that co-occurrence; it can't show why each company chose it.
We found 721,419 companies running it, or 39% of every company we checked. Public records show it at X, Roblox and Zoom.
For buyers, Cloudflare is less a rival to AWS than a layer many AWS customers add on top. For sellers, assume it is already present at a large share of target accounts.
What is the market share of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud?
Amazon took 29% of worldwide cloud infrastructure spending in the third quarter of 2025, according to Synergy Research Group. In our company counts, AWS is the largest hyperscaler and the second most common tool overall, with records at Substack and the UN.
We see 146,473 companies running AWS. Google Cloud comes next among the hyperscalers with 76,738, with records at AppLovin and arXiv.
Microsoft Azure ranks sixth by company count, behind WP Engine and Vercel. That's low for one of the three providers taking most cloud spending. In our data Azure skews toward the largest enterprises and government; one possible reason for the modest count is that more of their work is internal and leaves fewer public traces. Its records include Microsoft's own Office and Bing.
Which smaller hosts show up most often?
WP Engine and Vercel are the most common specialist hosts, almost level despite serving very different buyers. WP Engine hosts WordPress sites, with records at Oxford University Press and UC Berkeley. Vercel hosts and deploys web apps for developers, and appears at OpenAI.
Kinsta, Netlify, DigitalOcean and Heroku each have a much smaller footprint. Heroku is the smallest of the 10, with 3,006 companies, including Klaviyo. Netlify's records include Stanford University.
A small footprint is not a verdict on the product. These tools target narrower audiences, and some are adding companies quickly.
Does cloud hosting usage differ by company size?
Between roughly two in five and three in five companies in every size band run one of these tools, and Cloudflare is the most used tool in all five bands. The real differences show up in which providers each band leans toward.
Do small businesses use cloud hosting as much as large companies?
Yes, and the smallest firms use it slightly more than mid-sized ones. Among companies with 1–10 employees, 59% run at least one of these tools, the highest rate of any band. Companies with 1,001+ employees come next at 56%.
The dip sits in the 11–50 band, at 42%, which is also by far our largest band. Companies with 51–200 and 201–1,000 employees sit right around half.
The chart shows the adoption rate in each band.
- Any of these tools
- Cloudflare
Share of companies of each size we checked that run any of these tools, and that run Cloudflare. Companies with a known size only.
The 1–10 band is our smallest sample, so its rate is the least stable. Still, cloud hosting is clearly not an enterprise-only purchase, and a vendor chasing tiny teams faces an incumbent at most of them.
Which providers lean toward large enterprises?
Microsoft Azure is the clearest enterprise skew in the group. Azure's companies are 4.2x more likely than the average company to have 10,000+ employees, and 4.1x more likely to be in Government Administration.
AWS is broader, over-indexing at both ends: 1.8x on the 1,001–5,000 band and 1.8x on the 1–10 band. That matches the vendor's pitch of infrastructure for organizations of any size.
If you sell to the largest organizations, Azure is the platform most likely to be in the room, and its modest company count understates its weight there.
Which providers lean toward the smallest teams?
Vercel leans strongly toward small teams. Its companies are 3.6x more likely than average to have 1–10 employees, a stronger skew toward the smallest band than AWS's 1.8x. Netlify and Heroku also over-index on that band.
Cloudflare doesn't lean anywhere; it simply leads everywhere. In the 11–50 band, 84% of companies running any of these tools run Cloudflare.
Developer platforms win early-stage teams first, which is why the startup data below deserves a close look.
Which industries use cloud hosting the most?
Software and internet companies have the highest adoption, and Cloudflare is the most used tool in all ten of the largest industries we track. The interesting part is which specialists cluster where.
Which industries have the highest cloud hosting adoption?
Software companies lead: 47% of the software companies we checked run at least one of these tools. Internet companies follow closely, and Financial Services ranks third at 44%.
Retail and Healthcare come next. In both, the website is a front door (a storefront or a patient portal), so fast and secure delivery matters to the business.
The table lists the adoption rate and company count for each of the ten largest industries.
| Industry | Checked | Run one | Rate | Most used |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software | 79,511 | 37,713 | 47% | |
| Internet | 44,391 | 20,327 | 46% | |
| Financial Services | 63,409 | 27,614 | 44% | |
| Retail | 77,535 | 32,887 | 42% | |
| Healthcare | 64,683 | 26,331 | 41% | |
| Health, Wellness and Fitness | 46,467 | 18,838 | 41% | |
| Real Estate | 69,771 | 25,782 | 37% | |
| IT Services | 174,344 | 62,288 | 36% | |
| Marketing and Advertising | 87,420 | 30,182 | 35% | |
| Management Consulting | 55,671 | 16,915 | 30% |
Which industries have the lowest adoption?
Management Consulting has the lowest rate among the ten largest industries, at 30%. Marketing and Advertising and IT Services sit just above it, with IT Services at 36%.
The IT Services result looks odd, since it is the most common industry for Cloudflare, Vercel and Azure. Scale explains part of that: it's our largest industry, with 62,288 companies running one of these tools, so a modest rate still means a big count.
One possibility, which our data doesn't confirm, is that many service firms run providers outside this group or keep their hosting out of public view. A low rate here doesn't mean these firms avoid the cloud.
Which hosts specialize in particular industries?
The managed WordPress hosts have the most distinctive industry mix. WP Engine's most common industry is Healthcare, and its companies are 2.3x more likely than average to be in Non-profit Organization Management. Kinsta shows the same pattern, over-indexing on nonprofits and Construction, with records at Arizona Baptist Children's Services.
Netlify, Heroku and DigitalOcean tilt toward Software and Internet companies, and Google Cloud toward Software. Azure is the government outlier.
Nonprofits and construction firms are where WP Engine and Kinsta over-index, which is useful targeting for any WordPress host. For a hyperscaler sales team, the public sector is Azure's home ground.
Which countries use cloud hosting the most?
Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom have the highest adoption of the eight countries in our data, and Germany has the lowest. The United States, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil and Canada are where Cloudflare has the most companies.
Which countries have the highest cloud hosting adoption?
Australia leads: 60% of the Australian companies we checked run at least one of these tools. Canada is next at 58%.
The United States follows closely and is by far the largest country in absolute terms. The United Kingdom rounds out the top four.
The table shows the rate and count for each country.
| Country | Checked | Run one | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 465,974 | 265,922 | 57% |
| United Kingdom | 97,945 | 53,735 | 55% |
| India | 130,898 | 44,997 | 34% |
| Brazil | 80,366 | 34,458 | 43% |
| Canada | 48,352 | 28,062 | 58% |
| Australia | 41,085 | 24,808 | 60% |
| Germany | 65,356 | 19,783 | 30% |
| Netherlands | 37,205 | 16,720 | 45% |
In these four markets, more than half of companies already run one of these tools, so a new vendor is mostly trying to displace something rather than fill a gap.
Which countries have the lowest adoption?
Germany has the lowest rate of the eight countries in our data, at 30%, and India is second lowest at 34%. Brazil and the Netherlands sit in the middle, below the English-speaking markets.
Companies on hosting providers outside this group leave no trace in it, so lower rates partly reflect which providers we cover rather than how much a country uses the cloud.
Official surveys show wide national differences too. Eurostat found that 79.2% of enterprises in Finland used paid cloud computing services in 2025, the highest in the EU, while Bulgaria was lowest at 17.8%.
What do the biggest websites and startups run?
The highest-traffic websites and Y Combinator startups both run these tools at higher rates than companies overall, but they pick different providers. Cloudflare leads in both groups; the runner-up is where they split.
Which cloud do the highest-traffic websites use?
Cloudflare is the most common tool on the highest-traffic websites we track, appearing on 47% of them. AWS is second at 28%.
Overall, 64% of these sites run at least one of the 10 tools. The rest may run their own infrastructure or use providers outside this group; our scans only see what leaves a public trace.
The table compares each tool's reach on high-traffic sites and among YC startups.
| Tool | Highest-traffic sites | Y Combinator startups | All companies |
|---|---|---|---|
| 47% | 65% | 39% | |
| Amazon Web Services | 28% | 31% | 7.9% |
| 6.9% | 15% | 4.2% | |
| 2.0% | 1.5% | 2.8% | |
| 5.5% | 43% | 2.8% | |
| 6.3% | 3.7% | 2.6% | |
| 0.2% | 0.4% | 0.7% | |
| 1.0% | 3.8% | 0.6% | |
| 0.2% | 0.8% | 0.4% | |
| 0.5% | 2.2% | 0.2% |
What hosting do Y Combinator startups use?
Startups adopt these tools almost universally, and Cloudflare leads here too, at 65% of the Y Combinator startups we checked.
The standout is Vercel. It appears at 43% of YC startups, ahead of AWS at 31%, even though Vercel reaches only a small share of the highest-traffic sites.
If you sell developer tooling, the Vercel stack is the most common hosting choice after Cloudflare among the startups most likely to grow into your future accounts.
Is cloud hosting adoption growing?
Yes. Over the last 90 days, starts outnumbered stops by a wide margin, and every tool except Google Cloud gained more companies than it lost.
How many companies started or stopped using a cloud host recently?
Starts far outnumber stops. We recorded 13,130 cases of a company starting one of these tools in our tracking window, against 2,680 stops.
A start means the tool appeared since the company's previous scan done the same way, and a company's first scan is a baseline that never counts as a start.
The chart breaks starts and stops down by tool.
A start is a tool found on a company's latest scan that its previous scan, done the same way, didn't find.
Which cloud hosting providers are gaining the most companies?
Cloudflare gained the most companies of any tool in the group. Over the window, 6,591 companies started running it and only 656 stopped.
Vercel had the second-largest net gain, a striking result for a tool with a small slice of Cloudflare's base. It logged 2,289 starts against 298 stops.
Microsoft Azure had the third-largest gain, with 2,241 starts far ahead of 529 stops, and Netlify was fourth. An enterprise-heavy platform being one of the fastest movers is the surprise here.
Five others also gained, in smaller amounts: Amazon Web Services, WP Engine, Kinsta, Heroku and DigitalOcean, in that order. Kinsta's churn was remarkably low, with just 4 stops, while DigitalOcean's starts and stops nearly cancelled out.
Is Google Cloud losing companies?
Yes. Google Cloud is the only one of the 10 tools with a net loss over the window: 575 companies stopped running it, against 446 that started.
A stop means the public trace disappeared, not necessarily that the company left the cloud. It may have moved a site, rerouted a domain or retired it. Moving workloads back to private infrastructure (repatriation) is one possible reason, but our scans can't separate it from an ordinary switch.
Do companies use more than one cloud provider?
Many do, though not always in the sense surveys mean by multi-cloud. Some of that overlap is a host plus a delivery layer such as Cloudflare, and each provider brings its own companion tools.
What share of companies use more than one cloud host?
About a quarter do. In our data, 224,198 companies run two or more of these tools at once, which is 26% of the companies running any of them.
That isn't always multi-cloud in the survey sense. One pattern is a host with Cloudflare in front of it, which counts as two tools but reflects one hosting decision plus a delivery layer. For example, 6.3% of Cloudflare's companies also run WP Engine.
When you read a multi-cloud statistic, check whether it means two infrastructure providers or one provider plus a network layer.
What do companies run alongside their cloud host?
Each host pulls in its own ecosystem. AWS customers often add more Amazon services: 26% also run Amazon SES, and 23% run Amazon CloudFront.
WP Engine has the strongest pairing in the group, with 67% of its companies also running Yoast SEO. Vercel companies frequently add Vercel Analytics and Next.js.
Google Cloud's most unusual companion is Wix, which 20% of its companies also run. These pairings are practical signals about a company's stack before you ever talk to it.
What should you take from this if you're choosing or selling cloud hosting?
The data points to clear audiences for each provider, and the outside research points to cost as the main pain. Here is how to use both.
What should buyers weigh when choosing a cloud host?
Start with fit, then cost. Hyperscalers suit engineering-heavy and large organizations, Vercel and Netlify suit frontend teams, WP Engine and Kinsta suit WordPress sites, and Cloudflare works as a delivery and security layer for nearly everyone.
Cost is the most-cited struggle in recent surveys. In InfoWorld's 2025 coverage of Flexera's State of the Cloud report, 84% of respondents named managing cloud spend as their top cloud challenge.
Companies are organizing around that problem. In Flexera's 2025 survey, 59% of organizations had a dedicated FinOps team, up from the year before.
For a ten-person team weighing AWS against a managed platform, the trade is control versus operational work. Heroku is built to run apps without handling servers, while AWS bills raw infrastructure by usage.
How can sales and marketing teams use cloud hosting data?
Use the host as a qualifier. An Azure footprint points toward a large or public-sector organization, a Vercel footprint toward a small developer-led team, and a WP Engine footprint toward a WordPress site often paired with HubSpot.
Growth data adds timing. A company that recently started a new host may be re-evaluating related tools, so recent starts are a useful timing signal. You can check a specific company's stack on our lookup page.
What does a cloud hosting detection look like?
Every match in our data comes with evidence like the record below.
api.example.com CNAME dynamic.x.com.cdn.cloudflare.netA record like this is a public trace: a DNS entry, certificate or custom domain pointing at a vendor. It proves the company routes part of its public web presence through that tool at the time of the scan. It doesn't prove how much the company spends or that the tool runs its whole stack.
How we counted
We checked the public records of 1,842,987 companies: DNS records, certificate logs and website code. A company counts as running a tool when one of those shows a direct trace, such as a DNS record, a verified domain, a script or a custom domain pointing at the vendor. The numbers were queried on November 1, 2026.
A start is a tool that appears at a company since its previous scan done the same way; a stop is one that disappears. A company's first scan is a baseline and never counts as a start. Starts and stops cover the last 90 days.
Size, industry and country are known for only part of the companies, so those rates are among companies where we know them. Our counts are not market share, revenue or paying-customer counts, one company can run several tools, and private use leaves no trace, so every rate is a lower bound. Outside figures come from Synergy Research Group, Eurostat, Flexera, InfoWorld and Amazon's earnings release, and we never combine them with our own counts.
If you cite this page, please credit the runsonwhat Research Team and include the date November 1, 2026. More on our method is on our research page.
Frequently asked questions
How much revenue does AWS make a year?
AWS generated $107.6 billion in segment sales in full-year 2024, according to Amazon's fourth-quarter 2024 earnings release. AWS is Amazon's cloud computing business, selling on-demand infrastructure such as computing, storage and databases billed by usage. It is one of the three providers, with Microsoft and Google, that together took most cloud infrastructure spending in the third quarter of 2025, per Synergy Research Group.
What percentage of EU businesses use cloud computing?
Just over half: Eurostat found that 52.7% of EU enterprises used paid cloud computing services in 2025. Adoption varies widely by country, with Finland the highest in the EU and Bulgaria the lowest. Eurostat also found that 45.5% of EU enterprises bought cloud-hosted database services, work that happens behind the scenes rather than on a public website.
Which hosting provider do startups use most?
Cloudflare is the most common cloud and hosting tool among Y Combinator startups, appearing at 65% of the ones runsonwhat checked. Vercel ranks second among startups, ahead of Amazon Web Services, even though Vercel reaches only a small share of the highest-traffic websites. Startups use these tools at a far higher rate than the average company.
What is the biggest challenge of cloud computing for companies?
In Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud survey, managing cloud spend was the most-named challenge, chosen as the top cloud challenge by a large majority of respondents, as reported by InfoWorld. Companies are responding with dedicated FinOps teams, which 59% of organizations in Flexera's 2025 survey had, up from the year before.
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