Four of the eight largest DNS operators for .ch domains are Swiss-owned, and together they account for 39.8% of the zone, by our count. In the United Kingdom, the same measure finds one British-owned company among the eight largest, 20i, with 2.6% of .uk domains.
We matched the eight largest operators in each of Europe’s eight largest country-code domain markets, Russia excluded, with their current owners, using annual reports, company registers and deal announcements. IONOS, majority-owned by Germany’s United Internet, owns the leading operator in three of them: Germany, Poland and Spain. GoDaddy leads in the UK, and team.blue’s TransIP leads in the Netherlands. In France, Italy and Switzerland the leader is domestically owned: OVHcloud, Aruba and Hostpoint.
Key facts
- IONOS, STRATO and united-domains, all IONOS group brands, hold 36.3% of .de domains. The largest independent German host, All-Inkl.com, holds 6.1%.
- Among Poland’s eight largest operators, Polish-owned ones hold 22.2% of .pl domains, and IONOS’s home.pl and OVHcloud together 21.0%.
- team.blue’s TransIP and Vimexx together hold 17.7% of .nl domains, more than any other group among the eight largest.
- IONOS put Sedo up for sale in September 2025. By November 3, 2026, it had not announced a completed sale.
Counted by DNS Operator, Sorted by Owner’s Home Country
Our Market Insights data assigns each domain to the company whose name servers answer for it. A national market here means a country-code zone, such as .de or .ch, and the figures count domains, not customers or revenue. Cloudflare appears among the eight largest operators in all eight markets, and Google Cloud DNS in the UK and France, but both are a DNS layer rather than a host, so we set them aside. We also leave out the domain marketplaces Sedo and AfterMarket.pl and the wholesale registrars InterNetX and Openprovider, whose customers are mainly resellers. Registrars that sell directly to website owners, such as GoDaddy and united-domains, stay in.
An operator counts as domestic when the group it belongs to is based in the same country. That makes IONOS, based in Montabaur, domestic in Germany and foreign everywhere else. It also makes the Dutch host TransIP foreign-owned, because it is part of team.blue, based in Ghent, Belgium. Where a private company does not publish its owners, we classify it by its own seat, provided no group lists it among its brands.
The eight largest operators hold between 52% and 73% of each zone. The rest is not classified here, so the comparison describes the leading operators, not every domain in a zone.
| Market | Leader (owner), share | Domestic-owned, top eight | Foreign-owned, top eight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany (.de) | IONOS (IONOS Group), 18.8% | 42.4% | 6.3% |
| Switzerland (.ch) | Hostpoint (owner-managed), 17.9% | 39.8% | 11.9% |
| Italy (.it) | Aruba (Italian-owned), 34.4% | 36.7% | 17.0% |
| France (.fr) | OVHcloud (Klaba family), 35.7% | 35.7% | 29.2% |
| Poland (.pl) | home.pl (IONOS), 12.1% | 22.2% | 21.0% |
| Spain (.es) | IONOS (IONOS Group), 16.7% | 14.4% | 34.7% |
| Netherlands (.nl) | TransIP (team.blue), 12.1% | 10.2% | 30.0% |
| United Kingdom (.uk) | GoDaddy, 27.9% | 2.6% | 48.3% |
Shares are of each zone’s tracked domains, by our count. Domestic and foreign totals cover only the operators among each zone’s eight largest that this article classifies. Totals are computed from unrounded shares.
Germany: IONOS Leads at Home Through Five Brands
IONOS Group SE has been listed in Frankfurt since February 2023, and United Internet held 63.8% of its shares on June 30, 2026. Most of its German brands came through acquisitions. United Internet took a majority of InterNetX in 2004, agreed to buy united-domains from Lycos Europe in December 2008 and bought STRATO from Deutsche Telekom in a deal that closed in 2017. The IONOS 2025 annual report lists all three, along with Sedo, as fully owned subsidiaries.
IONOS, STRATO and united-domains together hold 36.3% of .de domains, and IONOS and STRATO alone hold 33.3%. With InterNetX and Sedo, which this comparison sets aside, the group’s five brands hold 44.4%. The largest operator outside the group is GoDaddy, with 6.3%. All-Inkl.com follows with 6.1%. Its imprint names a sole proprietorship, Neue Medien Münnich, owned by René Münnich.
One of the five is for sale. In September 2025 the IONOS executive board decided to sell Sedo, which it reports as its AdTech business, and management expected the sale to complete in the third quarter of 2026. IONOS had not announced a completed sale by November 3. Its third-quarter statement is due on November 12.
Switzerland and Italy: Leaders in Private Domestic Hands
Hostpoint leads Switzerland with 17.9% of .ch domains. In an April 2026 release it described itself as 100% owner-managed and still in Swiss hands. Co-founder and chief executive Markus Gebert contrasted that with providers that international groups have taken over. Infomaniak, second with 14.6%, has traded on the SIX Swiss Exchange since October 1, 2026, after a reverse takeover of Perrot Duval Holding. The Infomaniak Foundation keeps the majority of voting rights. cyon, with 4.0%, and hosttech, with 3.3%, are led by their founders.
The largest foreign-owned operator in Switzerland is METANET, with 5.4%. It joined the dogado group in January 2022, and dogado merged into group.one in 2023. group.one is based in Sweden and owned by a Cinven fund, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and its founder and management shareholders. Wix and GoDaddy are the other foreign-owned operators among the eight largest.
In Italy, Aruba holds 34.4% of .it domains, a leader’s share second only to OVHcloud’s in France. Aruba describes its capital as entirely Italian. Seeweb, with 2.3%, has been fully owned since 2020 by DHH, an Italian group listed on Euronext Growth Milan. Register.it, with 9.4%, is the largest foreign-owned operator. It joined team.blue as part of Register Group under a deal announced in September 2019, and its sole shareholder is Combell NV of Belgium. OVHcloud, GoDaddy and the privately owned SiteGround make up the rest of the foreign side.
France: OVHcloud at Home, Your.Online Behind Two French Brands
OVHcloud holds 35.7% of .fr domains, the largest share of any leader in the eight markets. The company has been listed on Euronext Paris since October 2021, and the Klaba family held 79.0% of its capital and 79.6% of its voting rights on December 5, 2025.
Foreign-owned operators hold 29.2% of the zone. IONOS has 11.0%. Two French-founded brands, Gandi with 6.7% and o2switch with 4.2%, belong to Your.Online. o2switch joined the Dutch group Total Webhosting Solutions in September 2022, and Gandi and TWS formed Your.Online in February 2023. Your.Online is based in Amsterdam and is part of Your.World, whose majority shareholder is the Dutch family investor Strikwerda Investments. Hostinger, a private Lithuanian company in which ConHostinger holds about 30%, has 4.5%, and Switzerland’s Infomaniak has 2.8%.
Poland: The Closest Split, With Buyers of Its Own
Poland’s largest operators are the most evenly divided of the eight markets. home.pl leads with 12.1%. United Internet closed its purchase on December 30, 2015, and the court register lists IONOS SE as the sole shareholder. OVHcloud adds 8.9%, so the two foreign groups hold 21.0%, and Polish-owned operators hold 22.2%.
Four companies make up the Polish side:
- cyber_Folks, with 8.2%, a company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
- nazwa.pl, with 5.4%, a Kraków company that is part of NetArt Group.
- SEOHOST.pl, with 4.8%, in which two private individuals hold 94% of the shares.
- LH.pl, with 3.8%, owned since July 2025 by its founder’s family foundation.
Polish companies are also buying. In February 2025 ITwiz reported that NetArt Group planned to spend more than €250 million on acquisitions to add at least a million users within five years. Its areas of interest included home.pl and the hosting business of cyber_Folks. According to the same report, the hosts Hostinghouse.pl, AttHost.pl, Netmark.pl and Linux.pl had joined the group in 2024. LH.pl has owned the hosting company Kylos since May 2022, and a merger of the two was resolved in September 2026.
Spain and the Netherlands: Leaders Owned From Abroad
IONOS leads Spain with 16.7% of .es domains. Its Spanish company, IONOS Cloud, is fully owned by IONOS SE, and United Internet bought the Logroño-based host Arsys in 2013, paying €138.1 million in cash. Our data attributes another 6.6% of .es domains to Locaweb, part of Brazil’s LWSA. Hostinger holds 5.8% and GoDaddy 5.7%.
Three Spanish-owned operators make the eight largest. Dinahosting, with 5.1%, describes itself as fully independent of Spanish and foreign investment groups. cdmon, with 4.9%, has a single shareholder, a holding company whose sole administrator is cdmon’s chief executive, Jaume Ramón Palau Potau. DonDominio, with 4.4%, is run by a company based in Manacor, Mallorca. team.blue and Your.Online also own Spanish brands, including Nominalia, Webempresa and Axarnet, none of them among the eight largest.
Among the eight largest operators in the Netherlands, foreign-owned ones hold 30.0% of .nl domains. team.blue holds 17.7% through TransIP, the leader, and Vimexx. TransIP joined Belgium’s Combell in June 2019 to create team.blue, in which Hg is the largest investor. STRATO gives IONOS 6.7% of .nl domains. Hostnet, with 5.5%, was bought by One.com in March 2020 and is now part of group.one.
The Dutch-owned side is Mijndomein, with 7.3%, and Yourhosting, with 3.0%. Mijndomein belongs to The Sharing Group, a steward-owned Amsterdam company founded by Henri de Jong, and Yourhosting to Your.Online.
The UK: GoDaddy First, One British-Owned Operator Among the Eight
The UK’s largest operators have the lowest domestic share of the eight markets. GoDaddy holds 27.9% of .uk domains. Its acquisition of Host Europe Group, completed in April 2017, brought it the British brands 123 Reg and Heart Internet. It sold Heart Internet to Your.Online in April 2024. IONOS holds 9.2% under its own name and another 5.2% through Fasthosts, which United Internet bought in 2006. Wix, headquartered in Tel Aviv and listed on Nasdaq, has 3.5%.
Namecheap, with 2.5%, is now in a private equity portfolio. In September 2025 Domain Name Wire reported, citing The Wall Street Journal, that CVC Capital Partners had agreed to buy a majority stake in a deal valuing the company at $1.5 billion including debt. CVC’s portfolio now lists Starlight, the company behind the Namecheap and Spaceship brands.
The one British-owned operator among the eight largest is 20i, with 2.6%. Tim and Jonathan Brealey launched it in 2016 and both sit on its board. Companies House records no person or company with significant control over it.
Final Thoughts
Among the eight largest operators in each zone, domestic owners hold more than foreign ones in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France, and less in Spain, the Netherlands and the UK, with Poland close to even.
A few groups recur across markets. IONOS has a brand among the eight largest in six of the eight markets, and GoDaddy in five. Deals also continue within single markets, as the four Polish hosts that joined NetArt Group in 2024 show. For an independent owner, the map shows which groups have already bought into its market and which leading operators remain under domestic ownership.
For an owner considering a sale, an outside view of how a buyer is likely to read the business can be useful before a process starts. A one-on-one M&A consultation can provide that perspective.
About the Data
Domain shares are ours, from our Market Insights snapshot dated October 30, 2026, reviewed on November 3, 2026. Each domain is attributed to the operator of its name servers. Shares are calculated against the domains Market Insights tracks in each country-code zone, not against the registry’s full count. The comparison uses the eight largest operators per zone, a standard concentration measure, and our country pages list more. The classification by the home country of each brand’s group and the sums are ours. Ownership comes from the annual reports, company registers and announcements listed below.
