Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors - CipherCue
Directory<br>EU Vendors<br>Docs<br>Pricing<br>Blog<br>Log in
Book a demo<br>Sign up free
research<br>Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors
7 July 2026 · 6 min read<br>· By Chris McCabe
We looked at the primary website apex and www records for 19,450 European company entities and asked a narrow question: which infrastructure vendor is serving the company's main web presence?
Across seven European markets, US-headquartered vendors serve the majority of primary company websites in two of them (the United Kingdom at 67.5% and the Netherlands at 53.6%), and the plurality in three more (Italy, Spain, and France, each between 44% and 49%). Cloudflare is the single largest internet-facing infrastructure vendor in every one of the seven countries we sampled, ahead of every other US vendor, every European hosting company, and every domestic ISP.
This is not an IP-geolocation study. It is a vendor attribution study. For each apex domain, we resolved DNS A/AAAA records and mapped the answering IPs to their announcing autonomous system. For CDN and proxy providers such as Cloudflare, that identifies the internet-facing serving vendor, not necessarily the origin host.
Vendor share by country
Each bar shows the percentage of primary company websites in that country served by a US-headquartered infrastructure vendor. The remainder is the "Other / regional" bucket, which includes European hosting companies, domestic ISPs, in-house infrastructure, and international vendors not matched by our keyword rules.
0%<br>25%<br>50%<br>75%<br>100%
UK
67.5%
NL
53.6%
IT
48.4%
ES
44.6%
FR
44.2%
DE
31.0%
PL
18.8%
US-HQ vendors serve the majority of the country's websites
US-HQ vendors are the largest cluster, but not a majority
Domestic hosting is the largest cluster
Share of primary company websites served by US-headquartered infrastructure vendors, by market.
Germany and Poland are the exceptions. Both have a dense domestic hosting industry (Hetzner, IONOS, STRATO, Mittwald in Germany; Home.pl, NetArt, ATMAN, Beyond in Poland) that shows up clearly in the observations. Everywhere else, US-headquartered vendors are either the plurality (Italy, Spain, France) or the majority (the UK, the Netherlands).
One vendor, in every country
The single largest internet-facing infrastructure vendor in every one of the seven markets is Cloudflare. Not the largest of the US-headquartered vendors, the largest of all vendors, foreign and domestic.
0%<br>10%<br>20%<br>30%<br>40%
UK
31.6%
NL
36.8%
IT
28.2%
ES
23.1%
FR
28.2%
DE
17.9%
PL
15.2%
Cloudflare share of primary company websites, by market. In every country, Cloudflare fronts more sites than any other vendor.
Amazon is the second-largest US vendor in most markets. Google, Microsoft, Fastly, Akamai, and Squarespace round out the classified set.
The full numbers
CountryEntitiesUS-HQ vendorsCloudflareAmazonOther US-HQOther / regional
United Kingdom918620 (67.5%)290115215298<br>Netherlands2,2411,201 (53.6%)8251502261,040<br>Italy2,3501,138 (48.4%)6632272481,212<br>Spain1,427637 (44.6%)329128180790<br>France2,5041,107 (44.2%)7061732281,397<br>Germany5,6791,763 (31.0%)1,0173903563,916<br>Poland4,331813 (18.8%)66069843,518
What this measures, and what it does not
This is a vendor question, not a geography question. It has to be, because the geography question is harder than it looks.
Every Cloudflare-served website in every country is served from a Cloudflare edge POP that is likely to be geographically close to the visitor. A French visitor to a French site behind Cloudflare is almost certainly served from a Cloudflare edge in France. That does not mean the site is French-hosted. It means the site is Cloudflare-fronted, and Cloudflare is a US company. The origin server behind the Cloudflare edge could be anywhere, including the customer's own datacentre or a European provider.
That distinction matters for policy and procurement. EU regulatory regimes increasingly focus on ICT supply chains, processor relationships, third-country exposure, operational resilience, switching, and concentration risk. Physical packet geography is only one part of that picture. The more basic question is: which vendor is the organisation relying on at the internet-facing layer?
What this study does not measure:
physical data-centre location
origin hosting provider behind a CDN or reverse proxy
EU sub-processor arrangements the customer has in place
regional data-plane isolation offered by the vendor
customer-specific product configuration and tenancy model
US-only versus EU-based administration and control-plane arrangements
What this does not say
We are not saying European companies should not use US-headquartered vendors. Cloudflare has DDoS mitigation and edge presence that European competitors have not matched at scale. There are reasonable technical reasons to end up where the market has ended up.
We are not saying this...