[westernmostcoy]

2. Of the YC companies that use hosting providers, 55% use AWS, 13% use Cloudflare and 6% use Rackspace.

Cloudflare is a CDN exclusively, right? Why are they counted among the hosting providers and not with CDNs in the next line?

[ebbv]

Yeah CloudFlare is not a hosting provider, so that piece seems erroneous. They are on the CDN line below, I just don't understand why they ended up on this line. Maybe because people's DNS points at CloudFlare?

[grape_]

That's correct, but it's very difficult to determine the hosting environment if you're using a CDN. I have a write up on my blog at https://www.gra.pe/?p=36. But the idea is that if you know the hosting IP, you now where the IP sits (ASN). If you determine the ASN, you know which provider is being used.

[grape_]

To add to this - what they probably did was run an nslookup or dig against the domains themselves. And whatever IP resolved for those domains, they checked who owned that IP space. With a CDN, it won't show AWS, it'll show the CDN.

[SLaber89]

Yep! Apologies for the misinformation here.