Who Hosts the Top 50 US Websites on the Internet?

I was writing up an article for Business2Community on Amazon’s dominance in the web hosting space with AWS. I’d always heard Netflix is the customer they love to tout as what AWS can do, but I hadn’t heard of any other big name customers calling AWS home. That logically led me to wonder where the other top 50 websites were hosted. Strangely, I couldn’t find much in the way of a comprehensive list. It took a little digging, but I did manage to track down information on every site that doesn’t have a CDN service sitting between it and its host (Fastly, Akamai & Cloudflare). From the data, a few surprising facts popped out.

• • A lot of the top websites actually keep their web hosting in house. More than I would have thought.
• • Bankers seem particularly distrustful of farming out their hosting.
• • When you remove the properties hosted by their parent company (like Office.com, Bing.com on Microsoft’s Azure), AWS is the undisputed leader, as suspected, serving up ten of the top fifty sites.
• • CDN’s are quite popular, and Fastly is the clear winner of the bunch. They weren’t even on my radar before tonight.
• • Porn peddlers don’t seem to be welcome on the same hosts as the more wholesome websites.

I’m very curious to know who the host is behind each of these CDN’s so if you have privileged knowledge, please post a comment below to help me tighten up the list. For those that are curious, I used Alexa’s top 50 trafficked sites in the US as my guide.

Last Checked 4/3/2019

* eBay tried out Azure during its launch back in 2010, yet it sounds like that try out didn’t have Azure getting called up to the big leagues at the time.
** Reddit & Imgur were on AWS in 2012 when a mass outage outage at AWS turned off a portion of the Internet. No word if that caused them to jump ship or continue on in the years since.