DNS Provider Market Share by Industry

Every website's address ultimately resolves through its nameservers — the NS records that tell the rest of the internet where to find it. Those records are public, and they reveal a surprising amount about who controls the infrastructure layer of the web.

We analyzed the NS records of 685,940 domains in LLMSE's classification database, matching them against 587 patterns covering 316 active DNS providers. Then we cross-referenced the results with website categories to answer a question no one else seems to be asking: does your industry's DNS infrastructure look different from everyone else's?

The answer is yes.

The Headline: Cloudflare Runs 40% of the Web's DNS

One company handles the nameserver resolution for more than four out of every ten domains in our dataset:

Cloudflare's dominance is not accidental. Its free DNS plan — bundled with CDN, DDoS protection, and a user-friendly dashboard — has made it the default choice for everything from personal blogs to Fortune 500 companies. At 277,244 domains, it has nearly four times the footprint of its closest competitor.

GoDaddy (10.2%) holds second place primarily as the world's largest domain registrar, where customers default to its built-in nameservers. AWS Route 53 (9.0%) reflects the cloud infrastructure boom — every company running on AWS tends to use Route 53 by inertia.

Market Concentration

The DNS market is concentrated at the top but has a remarkably long tail:

Twenty providers handle 81.7% of all DNS. The remaining 296 active providers split 18.3% — a long tail driven by regional hosting companies, niche registrars, and country-specific DNS services.

Compared to the email market (where Google and Microsoft control 65.9%), DNS is more fragmented. The top two DNS providers hold 50.6% vs. 65.9% for email. This reflects the lower switching cost and less lock-in: changing nameservers is a one-time DNS record update, while migrating email is a multi-day project.

The Full Top 20

Market Segments: Six Layers of DNS

DNS providers serve fundamentally different roles. Grouping them reveals the infrastructure stack:

Managed DNS (56.5%): The Performance Tier

The largest segment by far, dominated by providers that specialize in DNS resolution speed, reliability, and security features:

Cloudflare holds 71.5% of the managed DNS segment. Within this tier, the cloud provider troika — AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure — collectively accounts for 22.4%, suggesting that roughly one in five managed DNS users chose their cloud provider's nameservers.

NS1 (8,453 domains) punches above its weight. Despite being a pure-play DNS company without a CDN or cloud platform to bundle with, it has carved out a niche with enterprise and SaaS companies — our cross-referencing shows NS1 has the highest proportion of Technology/Computer & Electronics sites of any major provider.

Registrar DNS (21.9%): The Default Choice

When you register a domain, the registrar's nameservers are pre-configured. For many domain owners, the default is permanent:

GoDaddy dominates the registrar DNS segment with 46.5%, followed by Namecheap (13.3%) and OVH (8.9%). These numbers largely mirror domain registration market share — most customers never change their nameservers from the registrar default.

Network Solutions' position at #4 (10,385 domains) is notable. Once the internet's sole domain registrar, it now serves a base of legacy domains and enterprise customers who haven't migrated.

Web Hosting (8.3%): The Bundled Tier

57,124 domains use their hosting provider's nameservers — a more fragmented landscape than any other segment:

No single provider holds more than 17% of the hosting DNS segment. The diversity reflects the hosting market's fragmentation and the regional nature of web hosting — All-Inkl (Germany), TransIP (Netherlands), and Infomaniak (Switzerland) serve primarily local markets.

Website Builders (1.4%): The All-in-One Platforms

Wix and WordPress.com together account for 99% of the website builder DNS segment:

These numbers capture only sites using the platforms' own nameservers. Many Wix and WordPress.com sites use custom domains pointed via CNAME rather than NS delegation, so the actual platform usage is higher than these figures suggest.

DNS Providers by Industry

This is where it gets interesting. We cross-referenced DNS providers with website categories for the 18 largest providers, sampling up to 500 domains per provider. Different industries show distinct DNS fingerprints.

News & Media: Akamai Territory

Nearly half of all news and media domains in our sample use Akamai for DNS — reflecting the media industry's dependence on CDN infrastructure for content delivery. News sites need global edge performance and DDoS protection at scale, and Akamai has been the media industry's infrastructure partner for two decades. Azure DNS at 33.3% reflects Microsoft's enterprise relationships with major publishers.

Education: Azure Dominates

Education is the most Azure-heavy industry in our sample. This maps directly to Microsoft's education licensing programs — universities running on Microsoft 365 and Azure naturally use Azure DNS. The WordPress.com presence (12.5%) reflects academic departments and research groups using managed WordPress for project sites and blogs.

Technology: The Developer Stack

Technology sites have the most distinctive DNS profile of any industry. Vercel — a frontend deployment platform — leads at 20.1%, reflecting the developer community's adoption of Next.js and Vercel's hosting. NS1 (18.1%) is the DNS specialist that targets SaaS and API companies. Together, these two providers account for 38.2% of tech sites — providers that barely register in other industries.

Alibaba Cloud's 7.7% share in tech reflects the Chinese technology ecosystem's presence in our dataset.

Health: SMB Hosting Dominates

Health websites are overwhelmingly small-business operations — clinics, practices, wellness providers. Wix (12.4%), IONOS (12.4%), and SiteGround (11.4%) are all SMB-oriented platforms. The industry has the highest combined SMB-provider share (48.6%) of any sector we analyzed.

Beauty & Fitness: The Wix Effect

Wix leads beauty and fitness with 17.4% — the highest share for any single provider in any industry. Wix's template-driven approach and built-in booking tools make it a natural fit for salons, studios, and personal trainers. Combined SMB-provider share: 46.3%.

Automotive: European Infrastructure

Automotive sites lean heavily European — IONOS (Germany) and OVH (France) together account for 31.9%. This reflects the European automotive industry's web presence, from dealership networks to parts suppliers to independent repair shops.

Food & Drink: SiteGround's Niche

SiteGround leads food and drink with 20.2% — its highest share in any industry. SiteGround's WordPress-optimized hosting and reputation for customer support make it popular with restaurants, food bloggers, and small food businesses. Combined with Wix (19.0%), nearly 40% of food and drink sites use SMB-oriented providers.

The Enterprise vs. SMB Divide

Our cross-referencing reveals a clear split between industries that favor enterprise DNS infrastructure and those dominated by SMB platforms.

We classified five providers as enterprise indicators (AWS Route 53, Azure DNS, NS1, Akamai, Google Cloud DNS) and six as SMB indicators (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Wix, Bluehost, WordPress.com, SiteGround):

Only two industries lean enterprise: Computer & Electronics (+19.6) and Education (+3.7). Every other industry tilts toward SMB providers — sometimes dramatically. Beauty & Fitness has the largest SMB gap at +31.0 percentage points, while Computer & Electronics has the largest enterprise gap at +19.6.

This data essentially maps which industries have professionalized their web infrastructure versus which industries are still running on registrar defaults and website builder platforms.

What the Data Reveals

1. Cloudflare has won the default battle

At 40.4%, Cloudflare has achieved what GoDaddy achieved for domain registration: default status. When someone sets up a new website and thinks about DNS, Cloudflare is the first answer. Its free tier eliminated the traditional barrier (cost), and its all-in-one dashboard (DNS + CDN + security) eliminated the complexity barrier.

2. The "registrar default" is still enormous

21.9% of domains — over 150,000 — still use their registrar's built-in nameservers. These are domains where the owner registered the name and never thought about DNS again. For registrars, this is recurring infrastructure cost with zero revenue. For domain owners, it's often suboptimal performance and limited DNS features.

3. Industries have DNS signatures

Your DNS provider choice correlates with your industry more than you might expect. Media companies cluster on Akamai. Tech startups cluster on Vercel and NS1. Health practices cluster on Wix and IONOS. These patterns reflect real ecosystem effects — when your industry peers use a specific provider, your hosting recommendation, your agency, or your template marketplace pushes you toward the same infrastructure.

4. The SMB web runs on five providers

GoDaddy, Namecheap, Wix, SiteGround, and Bluehost together power a massive share of small-business websites across health, beauty, food, automotive, and local services. For these industries, "DNS provider choice" is really "hosting platform choice" — the DNS follows the website builder.

5. Asia-Pacific is building its own stack

Alibaba Cloud (6,777 domains), Tencent Cloud (1,976), and several Japanese providers (X-Server: 3,294, DNS.ne.jp: 2,132, Lolipop: 724) represent a separate DNS ecosystem serving the Asia-Pacific market. These providers are invisible in Western-focused market reports but collectively serve over 15,000 domains in our dataset.

Methodology

This report analyzed NS records for domains in LLMSE's classification database as of February 24, 2026. DNS providers were identified by matching NS hostnames against 587 patterns covering 316 active providers.

Industry cross-referencing was performed by sampling up to 500 domains per provider and looking up their website categories from LLMSE's classification cache. Sample sizes varied by provider based on cache coverage: providers with higher classification rates (Wix: 98%, WordPress.com: 99%, Akamai: 96%) produced more reliable industry distributions than providers whose domains had lower classification rates.

Limitations: We detect the outermost NS record only. Domains using a DNS provider behind a CDN's nameservers (e.g., a site using Route 53 behind Cloudflare) will be attributed to Cloudflare. NS records for blocked TLDs (.ru, .su) are excluded by design. Industry analysis is based on sampled data and should be treated as directional rather than exhaustive.

Explore the Data

LLMSE's DNS provider browser lets you explore all 316 active providers, view domain counts, and drill into any provider to see which domains use it. You can also use ns: filters in our advanced search to find domains by DNS provider.

This analysis was conducted using LLMSE, which has classified over 1.4 million websites across SEO, EEAT, WCAG accessibility, readability, and GARM brand safety dimensions. All data reflects the database as of February 2026. To analyze your own site, visit llmse.ai/classify.