Here's an interesting "Web Hosting Magazine" article from November 2001. Is web hosting "dead" or did the business models for all dot coms finally evolve into a competetive marketplace?

Article:
http://www.whmag.com/content/1101/death/index.asp

No web hosting is NOT dead the dot com boom is not dead.

What is dead is a few big players that thought they could come in take over the internet run out all the small guys and dominate the world. They all used the same theory throw enough money at it and we can take it over.

Well the Internet is the great equalizer it gives the little guy a shot. Will all the little guys make it? No! Nor should they, but what is emerging is what the Internet was when it started a great place to share information and resources. I may never be a gizillionare but I can and will make a nice living doing something I enjoy.

That is what the Internet is about, it empowers me and millions of others to make a living.

Web Hosting is dead to the ones that want to control it all but to the rest of us it is VERY much alive.

Monte climbs down off his soap box and goes back to work now.

That's correct, I totally agree with you Monte...

There are still zillions of ways to make it in a web host biz… especially if you have something to maintain your client, good service, 24/7 support or maybe an online site builder or store builder too…

the companies that wished they were as hip as the dot coms

LOL. I had read that article before. The slant or angle of that article is towards "big business" web hosting providers but it was still a good (if not comical) read.

I know one thing, the typical (i.e. smaller) web hosting company is NOT DEAD by any stretch. And it doesn't take some Enterprise level forcaster like Forrester to tell you that.

This industry is in its infancy. The prognosticators like to chew fat about what is and isn't working at any one moment, but the truth is, web hosting as an industry is no where near mature and/or dead. If it was, I wouldn't have been able to quit my very well paying "day job" to run my own wh biz fulltime. As have many others.

I think this message board alone is living proof that web hosting is not dead.

Web hosting is the foundation of the Internet. Without it, the Internet might as well be dead itself.

Isn't Web Hosting Magazine nearing its own death now? I seem to remember a thread about it. I don't read it myself.

Originally posted by Lawrence
Isn't Web Hosting Magazine nearing its own death now? I seem to remember a thread about it. I don't read it myself.

They stopped publishing a few months back. Now they're "coming back" as an online site, with registered users. In fact, it sounds like WHT.

Kevin

I have to say that the article did set off some alarms in my mind.

IMHO there is a particular breed of web hosting that, while not dead, is coming down with a little something. The simple discount host. Now I say this with the disclaimer that my company is currently doing discount hosting, but our goal is to be firmly out of that niche and to place our products firmly in the value added ASP realm.

I believe that the day is coming when hosting, like telephone services, will take on more of a utility role in the modern communications landscape. The community phone at the post office becomes the party line becomes the home phone becomes the cell phone. What caused this? Access. Telephone lines and later wireless service saturation increased. They became cheaper and more widely distributed. Telephone equipment went the same way and voila!

A shift is occurring in the xSP telecommunications sphere as well. Higher access saturation, cheaper access, well distributed access, faster access and--guess what?--the same is happening to equipment.

Something happened in telephone services over the last few years, it was “commoditized” to such a degree that it is now a de facto utility, an essential and basic service. Moreover, like every commodity the key selling point became price.

Something else is happening to the telephone market (now this is based purely on my own anecdotal experience and some thinly informed conjecture): people are beginning to take less and less notice of price (I for one just switch off when I hear one of those “call 1010 –wecansaveyoumorethantheotherguy” commercials or get a "switch and save" call from a Telco). Telco's are beginning to realize that in order to thrive in the market that is developing it is becoming increasingly important to differentiate themselves based on value-adds (e.g. unified messaging, international toll-free services, etc).

What does that say to me about the direction of hosting? It says that we will experience a similar shift. More and more businesses and individuals have high-speed connections and reasonably powerful machines. Many could host their own sites and servers. Why should they host with you? Value added services, that’s why. Support, hosted applications, integrated services and custom solutions are the future.

That's just MHO. You didn't read the whole thing did ya?

D.

I honestly think that article was from the "Big Boys" that are afraid of the "Little Boys" and that article shows that that are lossing ground to us "Little People"

When I got that magazine the whole front cover was black.

After I read the mag, I laughed and pitched it in the trash.

The biggest joke is that WHMAG is dead!!! They no longer offer a mag subscription. How ironic.

Yeah I remember that issue. I even commented on how silly it was here just after I read it. WHMag had it's place, but it certainly wasn't as an iron-clad reference to the state of the industry though. The fact is was on paper made it worth getting though (personally I enjoyed Chubby Johnson and Bit Bunker). They started to hound my e-mail address with getting me to sign up to their website - almost every day for weeks :rolleyes: I can read better sources online such as The Register, so I didn't bother signing up.

Nice to see Hosting Tech is still going along nicely though :)

Greg Moore