It has been an open secret for the past few weeks or months that United Internet was looking to acquire Arsys, the Spanish Domains, hosting and cloud provider, however today it was officially announced in a press release that they had bought Arsys for 140 million Euros. What effect will this have on the Spanish market, well with the press release saying that they will stay separate companies not too much, however I suspect that watchers will see a merging of technologies.
When you take a look at the GTld market in Spain 1&1 was already way out in the lead with over 150,000 more registrations that the closest competitor you guessed it Arsys.
Now with Arsys under their belt they truly dominate the Spanish market for domain registrations.
Game Over?
Not quite game over, people always look at just the domain registrations when looking at how popular a webhosting company is and while it is a very good indicator it is not where the largest profit margins are. When it comes to actual hosting 1&1 have been in 2nd place to OVH for some time (Active Sites measure Netcraft). However over the past 6 month 1&1 have been catching up with OVH. Before the take over the market for the top hosting providers in Spain looked like this.
The bad news for OVH is that it now looks like this.
From a pure numbers POV it looks like 1&1 will dominate the Spanish domain and hosting markets, however with the companies being kept separate very much in the same way 1&1 have kept Fasthosts a separate entity in the UK it looks like they are going after a very different section of the market, whilst boosting their market leader position.