Amazon.com and its Amazon Web Services unit appear to have hit a growth inflection point. Last September, Amazon.com became the largest hosting company in the world, based on the number of its Web-facing servers, as measured by online Web crawling and measurement firm Netcraft.
Eight months later, Netcraft reported in May, it had grown by more than 33%, to 158,000 servers.
The Netcraft survey is limited in how much it can see and must estimate the number of computers that operate behind the “Web-facing” servers of a given company. It says on its website that its counts miss those servers that don’t respond directly to an HTTP call, such as the database servers, firewalls, proxy servers, load balancing servers and others that lie behind the ones it sees at a given address. It estimates that it counts about two-thirds of the servers in use at a large hosting service, such as Amazon.
But the Netcraft counts do provide a relative measure of growth. Whatever Amazon’s total server count, it increased by more than a third in a recent eight-month period. In 2009, Netcraft counted 4,600 servers at Amazon.com. Four years later, it saw a 30-fold increase to the 158,000 figure.