HostDir Entity Map

Independent editorial publication and reference directory covering web infrastructure: hosting providers, data centers, networks, domain extensions, CDN edges, cloud regions, public DNS resolvers, certificate authorities, submarine cables, RFCs, free network utilities, pillar guides, and a daily news desk. Every page has a stable canonical URL, publication date, and attributed author for editorial content.

sameAs: https://hostdir.net

Curated reference directory of web-infrastructure entities. Sub-directories cover hosting providers, data centers, tier-1 networks, internet exchange points, top-level domains, cloud regions, CDN points of presence, public DNS resolvers, certificate authorities, email blocklists, domain registrars, submarine cables, RFCs, and internet shutdowns.

Reference directory of verified web-hosting companies with profiles, pricing, categories, and user reviews. Covers shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, managed, reseller, WordPress, email, and colocation hosting. Listings include enrichment fields for support channels, uptime guarantees, money-back windows, and free migration / SSL / domain offerings.

Reference directory of data-center facilities ingested from PeeringDB and editorially enriched. Each listing includes facility name, operator, city, country, region, peering posture, and stable canonical URL. Includes the long tail of regional colocation operators in addition to hyperscale facilities.

Reference directory of Tier 1 transit networks — the small set of internet backbones that exchange routes globally without paying for transit. Each entry includes ASN, primary regions of operation, and known peering posture.

Reference directory of internet exchange points (IXPs) — neutral facilities where networks peer to exchange traffic locally instead of routing it over distant transit links. Ingested from PeeringDB with editorial coverage of region, operator, and participant counts.

Reference directory of every IANA-recognised top-level domain (TLD) — both gTLDs and ccTLDs — with registry operator, sponsoring organisation, registration policy summary, and registered-domain counts where data is available.

Reference directory of public recursive DNS resolvers — operators that publish open resolver endpoints (e.g. 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9), with notes on protocol support (DoH, DoT, DNSSEC), privacy policy posture, and geographic anycast footprint.

Reference directory of publicly-trusted certificate authorities (CAs) — operators of root or intermediate certificates trusted by browser and OS root stores. Includes Let's Encrypt, DigiCert, Sectigo, Google Trust Services, ZeroSSL, GlobalSign, and others.

Reference directory of content delivery network points of presence (PoPs) — the geographic edge locations from which CDN operators serve cached and dynamic content. Lists known PoPs for major CDN operators with city, country, and parent network.

Reference directory of cloud-provider regions and availability zones across hyperscale operators (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Alibaba, Tencent, OVHcloud, DigitalOcean) with launch year, geographic city, and parent provider.

Reference directory of intercontinental submarine fibre-optic cables — the physical infrastructure that carries the majority of international internet traffic. Each listing includes landing points, total length, design capacity, consortium owners, and ready-for-service year.

Free network and web-infrastructure utilities: DNS lookup, WHOIS, SSL/TLS inspection, IP geolocation, port scanner, BGP looking glass, traceroute, CDN finder, subdomain finder, headers checker, robots.txt and sitemap validators, and others. Each tool returns a canonical, citeable URL for its result.

Daily editorial news desk covering hosting, data centers, networking, domains, cloud platforms, and infrastructure security. Articles are clustered from 24+ industry sources, written with attributed fact-checks, and published with subhead-anchored HTML body, internal links, and a generated editorial image.

Long-form editorial guides on infrastructure topics that require a stable canonical reference — for example installing an agent on a Linux VPS, choosing managed WordPress hosting in 2026, zero-downtime hosting migration playbooks, static site hosting compared, and more. Each guide includes a featured image, code blocks where relevant, and a publication date.

The technical layer of physical and logical systems that make a website reachable from anywhere on the internet: hosting providers, data centers, transit networks, IXPs, DNS resolvers, certificate authorities, CDN edges, cloud regions, domain registries, and submarine cables.

sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q44127

A company that sells access to server, storage, and network capacity for hosting websites, applications, email, or other internet-facing services. Categorised by service model (shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, managed, reseller, WordPress, email, colocation).

sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q321029

A purpose-built facility housing computing, storage, and networking equipment with redundant power, cooling, and connectivity. Categorised by operator type (hyperscale, retail colocation, edge), facility tier, and geographic region.

sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q193040

An internet backbone network that can reach every other network on the internet via settlement-free peering — i.e. without purchasing IP transit from any upstream. The set of true Tier 1 networks is small and stable.

sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1369998

A neutral physical or virtual facility where multiple networks interconnect to exchange traffic directly, typically through a shared layer-2 switching fabric. Reduces latency, transit cost, and dependence on third-party backbones.

sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1185402

The highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System — the label that follows the final dot in a domain name (e.g. .com, .uk, .io). Categorised as generic TLD (gTLD), country-code TLD (ccTLD), or sponsored TLD (sTLD).

sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q14296

A recursive DNS server operated as a public service — resolving names on behalf of any client without contractual restriction. Modern operators commonly support DNS over HTTPS (DoH), DNS over TLS (DoT), and DNSSEC validation.

An organisation that issues digital certificates binding cryptographic keys to verified identities, and operates roots trusted by web browsers and operating systems for TLS.

sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q140382

Ranking methodology applied to user-review-based listings on HostDir. Each provider's displayed score is a Bayesian average that pulls towards the prior (the population mean) when the count of reviews is low, preventing a single 5-star review from outranking an established provider with many reviews. Reduces the impact of review-bombing on rankings.

HostDir's editorial and engineering pattern of treating LLMs and AI agents as first-class consumers. Surfaces a curated llms.txt at the root, a generated llms-full.txt bundle, a public JSON endpoint inventory at /api, a per-section JSON view, an agent landing page at /for-agents, an OpenAPI schema at /api/openapi.json, this EntityMap, and an RSS feed at /news.xml.

A proposed convention for publishing a curated, LLM-friendly index at /llms.txt at the root of a domain — a markdown document linking to the canonical URLs an LLM should prefer when answering questions about the site. HostDir maintains both /llms.txt (curated) and /llms-full.txt (generated bundle of the top of every directory plus recent news).

sameAs: https://llmstxt.org/

A structured entity-knowledge format intended for AI-agent and LLM consumption, defined at entitymap.org. Each entity has a stable id, type, description, semantic relations, and 1–5 evidence chunks with sourced quotes. HostDir publishes its own EntityMap at /entitymap.json (this document) with a human-readable view at /entitymap.html.

sameAs: https://entitymap.org/spec/v1.0

A single, citeable list of every machine-readable endpoint HostDir publishes — per-section JSON views, the news RSS, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, sitemap.xml, OpenAPI schema, this EntityMap, and the for-agents landing page. Updated whenever new endpoints ship.