I ran a similar study a while back - I was curious to see if the YC incentives for startups (Azure credits, Amazon credits, Digital Ocean credits, etc.) were significantly swaying founders to use a technology stack.

You can find a quick analysis of registrars and DNS providers here - https://www.gra.pe/?p=77

You can find architecture analysis here - https://www.gra.pe/?p=36

Interesting stuff.

Also, I'm assuming Datanyze used the publicly facing domain of each of these websites (very similar to what I've done). What you'll notice is a lot of these startups have APIs or apps that have very different domains than the ones being used for their landing pages. I spoke to the folks at Bizspark about this and Azure adoption is pretty high (I believe these are private numbers).

Is the most popular domain registrar among YC cos really GoDaddy?

This seems pretty unusual given industry trends over the past, 5+ years. Do you separate GoDaddy resellers from GoDaddy direct?

Update: They are not separated.

> I see Namecheap come up in a lot of hackernews posts for recommended registrars. I’m assuming since Namecheap and many other popular startup-friendly registrars are both resellers of GoDaddy and eNom and are ICAAN accredited registrars, the WHOIS lookup may not reflect the proper registrar (i.e. they may show up as eNom instead of Namecheap).

I'm also surprised to see AWS Route 53 omitted as a registrar, and possibly as a name service, unless that's what "Amazon" under DNS refers to.

Still this data is useful and nice to have as a point of reference.

What is a "startup-friendly registrar"?

Godaddy has lots of annoying upsells in their checkout flow but they're cheap, fast and work just fine as a registrar and DNS host.

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.

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.

YC and many other incubators provide startups technology incentive programs (Digital Ocean providing $250k credits, Azure providing $500k in credits, etc.). Are any of the hardware startups here utilizing any of the incentive programs? If so, how so? Very interested to hear about cloud strategies, especially as they relate to hardware companies (APIs, IOTs, etc.).

From my brief research digital ocean only provides credits to YC companies unlike Microsoft, Azure, and even IBM's SoftLayer. I'd just like to point that out. That immediately disqualifies DO for large cloud products due to their pricing and product offerings.

You're absolutely right. I haven't really read through many of the DO use cases, so maybe I can start there. But, Microsoft also has a separate program for YC ($500K instead of $60k I believe for startups outside of YC). And I know Amazon and Google both have programs that are not exclusive to YC ($100k both). I'm very curious to see how hardware companies are using cloud, and if these incentives are even working.

Had an issue with formatting with tables in Wordpress :). Couldn't be bothered to look at it for more than a minute or so. I'll try to fix this now.