"Whose cloud powers 270,000 more websites than Amazon?" IBM asks in a recent advert nestled within the Wall Street Journal. Apparently the answer is no other than IBM. But is Big Blue really bigger than the seemingly unbeatable Amazon?
"IBM cloud offerings also support 30% more of the most popular websites than anyone else in the world," the ad continues to claim.
But is the SoftLayer-powered IBM cloud truly larger than Amazon's AWS? According to Gartner the short answer is "yes." The long answer? SoftLayer underpins a number of shared hosting providers, such as GoDaddy and HostGator. Such hosts might not count as "cloud," but their numerous, small sites make up for sheer volume on the "long tail" of the market.
Thus, if one is to use the Big Blue yardstick GoDaddy alone hosts more sites than Amazon and SoftLayer combined, with 431087 sites compared to the 358532 on SoftLayer servers and 73821 on Amazon. Read more...