One third of surfers hit Amazon cloud each day

 

Gallery

By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 19 Apr 2012 at 10:59

A third of surfers use websites hosted on Amazon’s AWS cloud at least once a day, according to research from Deepfield Networks.

The research highlights the growing importance of behind-the-scenes cloud providers - and shows how many people would be disrupted if servers went down.

The company put together research based on network traffic across millions of web users - mostly in North America - and said the results show just how important the Amazon cloud is becoming to the internet economy.

The research showed that 1% of all web traffic is going to or from its services, with a third of all web users visiting a site hosted on it at least once a day.

Although Amazon itself is a household name, AWS remains out of the limelight unless something goes wrong - as happened last August - and Deepfield said the service provided the infrastructure for a host of big name web operators, including “consumer names like DropBox, Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest”.

“One way to gauge the importance of Amazon is to ask how frequently will a typically internet user visit a web site based on Amazon infrastructure,” said Craig Labovitz on the Deepfields blog.

“The answer: an amazing third of all users every day. This number is all the more impressive when you consider that our data includes millions of users and end devices of limited scope or activities, such as users who only check mail and home game consoles.”