Intelligence · State of Web 2026
The Great Unbundling
How European hosting operators are losing the stack, and how data can win it back.
This paper cuts through market hype to provide real commercial intelligence across 55M+ European ccTLD domains. Read on to learn whether AI threats are genuine, where traditional models remain resilient, and how hosters can use infrastructure data to defend high-margin service attach.
Target
Euro Digital Ecosystem
Timeframe
Q3 2026
Author
Nadya Frost
Key Insights
Market share of Lovable in 2026. While popular in its home Nordic markets, Lovable is still niche in continental Europe with 1-2% shares in DE, NL, ES.
Of domains with a Cloudflare signal are actually using its full compute stack. Cloudflare's market dominance is wildly inflated by standard measurement tools.
Of the highest-value, commercially sophisticated sites are not running trendy AI tools. They run on custom code or highly configured WordPress.
Ratio of Domains : Websites in GoDaddy's European portfolio. The global giant is managing millions of domains without capturing high-margin service fees on top.
Part 1
DNS vs. Compute: The Baseline Illusion
The industry's standard competitive maps are built on registrar IDs or nameserver records. What they don't show is who captures commercial value: where the web server actually runs, what platform serves the page, what tooling sits on top. If you're relying on registrar-based or zone-file reports, your understanding of competitive positioning is, in places, systemically wrong.
Two top-10 lists. Same market. Different picture.
ShareShift compared the top 10 pan-European vendors across two methodologies, NS-based and A-record-based, across the same universe of 55M+ active European ccTLD domains. Neither list is definitive in isolation. Compared, they reveal a structural gap that a single methodology cannot see.
Three brands read differently depending on the lens:
- GoDaddy is the starkest example of ARPU erosion at pan-European scale. At 7.3% DNS share, the GoDaddy Group manages nameservers for more European domains than almost any other entity. While its combined European hosting ranking is outside the top 10 entirely. For most of those sites, GoDaddy is only collecting a renewal fee.
- AWS at 8.6% hosting share is not winning European SMBs directly. It is the infrastructure layer underneath the platforms that are: Vercel, Shopify, many developer-built SaaS products. A significant share of GoDaddy's own hosting runs on AWS. The 8.6% is an aggregation of other brands' customer relationships, not AWS's own commercial reach into the European SMB market.
- Hetzner shows the same structural gap but with a different origin. Its jump from 1.9% DNS to 5.6% hosting share reflects two things: direct developer customers, and indirect volume from other registrars and marketplaces like Dovendi routing their hosting through Hetzner infrastructure.
What both lists miss
Vercel appears in neither the DNS nor the hosting top 10, despite 250k+ active European sites. Because of its infrastructure setup, NS-based reports undercount it by ~7x, and its compute is absorbed into AWS's share.
ShareShift's multi-signal methodology is the only reliable way to see Vercel's true European footprint. And it matters, because Vercel is growing fast - see next section.
| # | Domain Provider | DNS Share | L3M Δ | Web Host | Host Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | IONOS (United Internet) | 8.2% | −0.07 | IONOS (United Internet) | 10.1% |
| 2 | GoDaddy Group ⚡ (#12 in hosting) | 7.3% | −0.21 | Amazon AWS⚡ | 8.6% |
| 3 | Cloudflare | 7.3% | −5.55 | Cloudflare | 6.8% |
| 4 | Strato (United Internet) | 5.5% | +0.64 | Hetzner ⚡ | 5.6% |
| 5 | OVHcloud | 4.9% | −0.17 | OVHcloud | 4.3% |
| 6 | One.com (group.one) | 3.5% | +0.02 | Strato (United Internet) | 3.4% |
| 7 | All-Inkl.com | 2.0% | −0.08 | One.com (group.one) | 2.1% |
| 8 | Aruba S.p.A. | 2.0% | −0.04 | All-Inkl.com | 2.0% |
| 9 | Hetzner | 1.9% | −0.04 | Aruba S.p.A. | 1.8% |
| 10 | SedoParking | 1.6% | −0.12 | Wix | 1.7% |
Cloudflare: 13× inflated, four distinct populations
Cloudflare appears as #3 in both Top 10 DNS and Top 10 Hosting providers in Europe. In both cases, the number overstates its commercial relevance - for different reasons. Treating Cloudflare's measured footprint as a unified market position leads to misallocation of competitive attention.
Rather than treating Cloudflare as a single competitor, ShareShift segmented all domains with a Cloudflare signal into four commercially distinct populations, each requiring a different response.
- DNS management only: 11.6%
- CDN layer on top of another host 33.5%
- DNS + CDN, security layer shielding actual infra 47.6%
- Full stack (DNS + proxy + Cloudflare compute) 7.5%
- DNS11.6%
- DNS+CDN47.4%
- CDN33.5%
- Full stack7.5%
CloudFlare Trojan?
The headline dominance of Cloudflare is a modern-day wooden horse left on the beach.
Today, their massive scale is startlingly hollow; the footprint is bloated with free-tier users and system defaults. These raw deployment signals carry almost zero immediate commercial value.
However, dismissing the structure entirely is a mistake. That 7.5 percent full-stack compute segment is a loud signal of what is to come. Free DNS and proxy services are merely a wedge product, designed to build trust and capture the network control plane. As Cloudflare aggressively ships an expanding ecosystem of new products, the switch risk for traditional hosts quietly multiplies. For a hosting provider, explicitly bundling Cloudflare CDN for your customers might feel like a cheap performance win today. In reality, the niche vendor may eventually walk away with the entire customer relationship.
PART 2
The Site Builder Squeeze
In 2026, closed web ecosystems like Wix and Squarespace have swiftly gone from being an existential threat to traditional hosting - to irrelevant niche tools that AI will soon make obsolete. The data supports neither conclusion.
The site builder market runs 2% of the European market, and is not (yet) collapsing under AI pressure. We'll watch this space closely as Wix goes headless in an attempt to stay relevant. For now, new customer intake has held relatively steady.
As a category, site builders control 2% of the European domain space. That's millions of steady-state sites generating predictable revenue. Relative to Wix, Squarespace CMS and Jimdo are significantly smaller. Here is how the relative shares are distributed:
- Wix is the largest site builder in Europe, controlling the full tech stack on 3/4 of its domains. The rest is largely explained by the Cloudflare proxy for additional protection.
- Squarespace is smaller, and more fragmented. Only 47% of sites built with this tool use its DNS infrastructure. The rest manages their domains via traditional registrars like GoDaddy or IONOS.
- Jimdo is the only European site builder in top 3. Its vertically integrated with 90% of sites fully trusting the service. However, Jimdo's growth metrics point to a product in structural decline.
Following the acquisition, millions of Google Domains were migrated onto Squarespace’s DNS infrastructure. As a result, the true Squarespace site builder audience is c. 3.2x times smaller than the DNS footprint implies. This is the same structural distortion that DNS-first market intelligence tools produce at scale: registrar market share and product usage are not the same number.
ShareShift provides ultimate flexibility to run analytics with a focus on on NS, Hosting or App based domain attribution.
2026 Trajectory: Site builders contracting
While intake is holding steady, exit volume is rising across three drivers simultaneously:
- Structural churn is the primary driver for both Wix and Squarespace. For Jimdo, the volume of deleted domains has nearly doubled since January. These are domains going dark from expiry or deletion; churn that is notoriously high to address.
- Migratory churn is secondary in absolute volume but rising. For Wix, switcher volume is up approximately 50% year-on-year. For Jimdo, every second domain migrates somewhere else.
- DNS management activity. Domains activating Cloudflare may register as a migration at NS level while the domain and website remain unchanged. This pattern accounts for 27% of all apparent migrations in the last 12 months.
explainer TABLE ABOUT SWITCHING
Commercial Insight
Hosters + Site Builders
Millions of sites built on proprietary technology outside hosters' control. Or are they?
For 400,000+ European Wix- and Squarespace-built sites, nameservers (and therefore the domain registration) are operated by IONOS or GoDaddy or another hoster. At an average renewal fee of €20/domain, that's €8M in recurring revenue from a segment they're often told to write off. The domain relationship already exists. The question is what else they can do with it.
ShareShift identifies two concrete revenue opportunities in this segment, available to any operator willing to look. Paying customers get ready access to domain lists in this segment.
Converting switchers
When SMBs leave site builders, they predominantly move to traditional hosting providers - not to other site builders, and not to AI tools. Hetzner, IONOS, Strato, Hostinger, and OVH receive more site builder leavers than any AI-native platform.
For operators holding the domain of a Wix or Jimdo customer, this is a direct commercial signal. If you're not visible when the customer is reconsidering their tech stack, another competitor will be.
Upselling email
None of the major site builder platforms provide email natively. Roughly a quarter of their users have it anyway, according to ShareShift's State of Mail 2026 analysis.
For the 400,000+ site builder domains held by traditional hosting operators, that's a direct upsell opportunity sitting inside an existing customer relationship. Email attach is also the strongest single driver of first-year retention in the industry.
WORDPRESS
standing apart but within the CMS / site builder space, WordPress dominates Europe. But for how long?
Declining share of new sites YTD 2026. links to recent challenges and opportunities around WP.
Part 3
The E-Commerce Extraction
At least 1 in 20 European sites is a transactional one, according to ShareShift telemetry. Our scanners read e-commerce fingerprints (WooCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, and others detected via DOM and JS analysis), as well as payment gateway scripts (Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, Adyen, Mollie, and regional equivalents). This is a conservative estimate, since our scanners do not reach deep into each website, and likely miss shopping carts and payment buttons on specific pages or subdomains.
Platform structure: who owns European e-commerce?
Across 827,000 e-commerce domains fingerprinted by ShareShift, WooCommerce averages 69% share and Shopify averages 18%. The remaining 13% is split between PrestaShop (strong in France, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic), Shopware (almost exclusively DACH), Magento, Ecwid, and BigCommerce each below 4%.
The two-platform concentration means that for large pan-European hosters, the e-commerce question reduces to a single strategic question: how many of your e-commerce customers are on WooCommerce (and therefore still paying for hosting) versus Shopify (and paying you only for the domain)?
However, for regional and local operators, important nuances exist:
· Shopify is strongest where purchasing power is highest. The five markets where Shopify share exceeds 25% are UK, DK, NO, SE & DE; these are also markets with high average transaction values and overall e-commerce penetration rates. Here merchants are ready to pay for specialized SaaS rather than put a custom web tech stack together from components.
· Central and Eastern European markets are WooCommerce-dominant, with 82–87% share in .hu and .sk. The implication is that hosting revenue from e-commerce customers is significantly more secure in CEE markets than in Western and Nordic ones. But CEE is also where Shopify's growth runway is largest.
· PrestaShop presents a significant hosting-dependent e-commerce population in the markets where it’s strongest. Any hoster with a French, Spanish, Polish, or Czech customer base should be tracking PrestaShop separately.
Hosters’ defence
Hosting-independent platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce) are a direct erosion of revenues, and it’s not symmetrical. Hosters lose the high-frequency, high-margin revenue while retaining the low-frequency, low-margin anchor: the domain renewal.
Strategic implication: two different plays for two different markets. Both readily available within ShareShift’s interface.
CEE and Southern Europe: Compete on managed WordPress and WooCommerce quality, performance.
UK, DACH, and Nordics: Leverage platform intelligence to target pay-only sites with no Shopify signals, and build retention flows for those that do.
[NF1]Make into cards
Strategic Insight
Pay-only share up to 8%
While we typically think of an online store when considering transactional websites, many professional services and donation pages look like static sites with a direct payment integration with Stripe or PayPal. These represent a distinct revenue extraction pattern, where the hosting relationship may still exist and the payment infrastructure signals a highly-valuable and committed customer.
Across European markets, .uk has the highest share of pay-only sites within the transactional universe – nearly 8%. Nordic and DACH markets are in the 5-6% range, while Eastern European markets sit at the other end; their transactional web is almost entirely platform-driven, with minimal standalone payment integration.]
Part 4
Next-gen Threat: Building with AI
AI-based web software is not just changing how websites are built. It changes who decides where websites are hosted. And the answer is increasingly: the builder tool decides, not the user. European hosting operators have no seat at that table.
Thankfully, there is still time. Together, all sites running on the next-gen stack outside the traditional hosting universe represent c. 12% of the European web. How rapidly this share is likely to expand, and which tools and vendors will capture the growth is analysed in this chapter.
text tbd
Part 5
Unmasking infrastructure debt
The European web is mostly broken. If we consider all technical signals, only 16% of domains operate without a single error or warning.
When we strip away the noise of forgotten SSL renewals and empty DNS records to look strictly at structural integrity, distinct trends emerge.
text tbd
maybe move up?
Part 6
Which domains have the highest value?
Introducing the Commercial Tech Score
The question every operator should be asking is not how many domains they manage; it is how many domains belong to businesses that are actively investing in their online presence. ShareShift’s Commercial Tech Score answers that question using publicly detectable tech signals. And what the data shows is not what most people expect.
text tbd
Appendix
Methodology & scope.
Data Sourcing
Data is sourced via the ShareShift Scanner, a proprietary methodology that interprets publicly available technical signals from the web. The latest telemetry scans were delivered on June 4, 2026.
Scope
56.M domains across European ccTLDs. The Email Attach Matrix analyzes a cohort of 280k+ European domains created in May 2026. Providers are chosen based on total number of domains added to inventory.
Attribution Methodology
It is only possible to attribute a domain to a provider if the MX records point to their mail servers. ShareShift has mapped over 60% of mail servers detectable through DNS to known providers. Remaining unmapped servers are hosting >100 domains each.
Detectability Constraints
The matrix covers only detectable signals. The customer may be paying for additional unused services without a technical footprint on the public web. Or the customer may be unaware of automatically provisioned mail hosting that they did not sign up for.
Want early access to our research?
Get notified when new briefs are published and access pre-release findings before the wider market.