

Microsoft overtakes Amazon to become the largest hosting company - stirno
http://www.onwindows.com/Article/microsoft-overtakes-amazon-to-become-the-largest-hosting-company-2392

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Gys
The article only compares Windows hosting numbers. It does not include Linux.
I _think_ for Amazon the number of Windows hosts is relatively small compared
to the total hostings...

A typical vendor-sponsered research result :-)

~~~
skc
The article clearly says "In the February 2014 Web Server survey Netcraft
found 27,000 web-facing computers (both Windows and Linux) using the cloud
computing platform."

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fieryscribe
Yes, that's the total number of web-facing computers found on Azure, of which
23,400 are Windows-based. Amazon has 22,600 Windows-based web-facing
computers, which puts it in second-place for world's largest Windows hosting
company.

They never directly compared the Linux-based web-facing computers.

The original article at NetCraft is slightly more clear about this:
[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/26/microsoft-
neck-...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/26/microsoft-neck-and-
neck-with-amazon-in-windows-hosting.html)

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lvh
It appears that this is mostly due to the growth in Azure, and that _that_
growth is primarily due to Microsoft cloud-hosted services using Azure. (The
article does state that part of the growth is due to internal MS stuff, but
does not give any indication about the relative amount of MS machines vs third
party users' machines.)

~~~
pedalpete
True, but what else would you think it would be compared to.

It appears to use number of domains as the measurement, not sure if sub-
domains are included in that, but either way, is there reason to believe that
Microsoft is running considerably more domains than Amazon? Sure they have
more products, but not thousands more.

Therefore, I think it is safe to assume that most of these 'web facing
computers' are customer servers, and if so, that is a telling sign for Azure.
AWS has been in the marketplace longer, and has the mindshare. I'm surprised
to see Microsoft anywhere near AWS numbers.

