i am looking for the number of business websites and shared website
hosting plans in the united states broken out by small (<100
employees) and medium (101 - 999 employees) sized businesses (need
credible reference also).  It would also be helpful if the numbers
were broken out by number of custom websites and number of template
based websites, if possible.

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Clarification of Question by steveg_nyc-ga on 06 Aug 2004 07:42 PDT

i am looking for the number of U.S. business that have a website and
the growth over the past couple of years.  one potential way to get
the number is to find the number of shared website hosting accounts
(not the number of website hosting companies) in the U.S because every
website needs a hosting account.

ideally, i would like the data broken out by the number of small (<100
employees) and medium (101 - 999 employees) sized business websites.

i will need a credible reference(s) also.
 
thank you.

It may be my lack of computer smarts, but something is wrong. I
suggest you cancel and ask again in different words. I'll guess 100
million web sites that might be business or clearly are and do some
business/comunication with USA addresses. Are you asking that the
hosting company has an address in the USA or their corporate
headquarters are in the USA? Perhaps you are interested in the gross
customer count of all the hosting companies that do occasional
business in the USA. Perhaps you need to define hosting company. ie 
The New York times news paper hosts www.abuzz.com and at least one
other Forum/message board: Does that make them a hosting company? Many
web sites can still be accessed, but don't funtion properly,
apparently abandoned, and unmonitored. Do you want to count those? 
Neil