Analyzing YC14 companies' hosting decisions

A few years ago, Joel had published a chart summarizing the hosting decisions of YC companies.

I wanted to find out how things have changed since then, so here’s the breakdown of the hosting decisions of 107 YC14 companies taken from YCUniverse.

Domain Registrars

Given the negative sentiment about GoDaddy that’s so prevalent on HN, I was surprised to find GoDaddy still being preferred by one-thirds of the YC14 start-ups. My original prediction here was about eNom (and its resellers like Namecheap) dominating, but that’s not to be.

Hosting

My original prediction here was AWS being used by 75% of the start-ups, but the actual number turned out to be a touch lower. More surprisingly, a significant number of YC14 companies seem to be hosted on GoDaddy.

SSL Certificates

About 10% of the YC companies do not have a HTTPS enabled website (not that this by itself is to be always frowned upon). Among the ones that did, some of them did not redirect non-HTTP requests to HTTPS.

You can download the raw data here.

This post was written by Kishore Nallan