Web Hosting Business Trends and Market Overview

Like any other technology based industry, web hosting is a constantly changing market.

The decreasing cost of server hardware has changed the marketplace; allowing everyone to have their own individual website, rather than just huge international companies. The same hardware changes have also resulted in hardware that is faster and more reliable than the servers of the past. These new advances, combined with server software such as cPanel, give today’s webhosting users a platform as easy to understand as a standard PC.

 Webhosting clients of tomorrow will experience much superior hosting services as companies continue to update hardware and software to meet future demand. The most notable change in webhosting services is the advent of ‘unlimited hosting.’ The idea of unlimited hosting is nothing new; however, due the high cost of hardware it has been essentially impossible to offer the service. As hardware and broadband prices continue to fall, major hosting companies (such as Dreamhost, BlueHost, and Hostgator) have been able to offer unlimited hosting for almost no additional price.

The biggest issue plaguing users of these plans is that no company can truly offer unlimited disk space or bandwidth is impossible and many companies have instituted restrictive terms of service which do not allow their servers to be used for personal data storage. Dreamhost changed this, and showing a sense of humor, started their “Unlimited + 50 gb!!!!” promotion, letting users use 50 gigabytes of disk space for storage purposes.

As broadband speeds continue to increase and broadband usage continues to increase, web designers have had increasing liberty to use multimedia, like flash and movies, in their designs. Though a simple flash movie doesn’t require any modification, for designers to show an MPEG movie in their website FFMPEG and other tools need to be installed. As more companies are using streaming movies in their designs, more hosting companies will implement this feature into their services to both retain customers as well has take clients from other companies.

As the number of white box shared hosting providers continues to increase, the need for both companies and users to switch to a niche company continues to increase as well. Though niche providers may cost slightly more, the benefits to users are well worth the increased cost due to the services these companies provide. Many times niche hosting companies offer additional services relating to the particular market they’re targeting. For example, a small business niche company may offer to put invoicing systems on their server.

One of the specialized industries that have grown along-side broadband and streaming media is the Content Delivery Network. Content Delivery Networks, which can be massive in size, consist of servers strategically placed across a country or the globe. Using these networks to mirror both audio and video provide for faster load times than a single server. Also, since there is more than just a single server processing all requests, a CDN provides a fail-safe redundancy to handle even the busiest traffic spikes any website might experience.

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