Hi guys! A simple question again....where do you see the Web hosting industry going in the coming (oh, let's say 5) years?

Thanks for any insight!

~ D

I remember reading a thread somewhere that everyone will be able to host their own sites. That really was interesting and I wondered how true?

I think though hosting companies - the smaller ones - will need to be able to provide more than just hosting. The larger ones, they will already have the market share. The smaller ones, will maybe partner with designers / developers to help with maintenance of websites.

Sure - there are CMS systems, blogs, portals, etc - and I think they are here to stay but people will always want more.

Corey:

I do believe you are correct. The technology industry has come a long way since the start; however, there is always a service needed. Like I have stated befor with the majority of world still not knowing what web hosting is I do not for see us going away anytime soon.

Thanks for the input, guys. So do you see a possibility that, say, 10 years out, "hosting from home" could become a reality?

I feel this industry is going in two directions, one which is almost free with tons of space and tons of overselling. The other is a specialised hosting take for eg IIS 7 hosting with MS SQL , Sharepoint and Expression etc all integrated. This will be a high margin growth area. 10 years down the road, maybe hosting may still be here but may be evolved in such a way that no one will recognize it as it is now.

Well, the industry will go where the customers direct it.

If there is demand for "do it yourself" web hosting.. then it will thrive.

Personally, I feel that there will always be a big market of people who prefer to spend their money and hire someone else to do it for them.

You can clean your own pool.. but how many rich people do you know that do this? How many rich people do you know that do their own dishes, housecleaning, etc. Some of the rich don't even do their own cooking or drive their own cars.

This is the target market I think is very lucrative, and will be around forever, regardless of where the "industry" goes.

interesting thread, I very much agree with the above 2 posts..

Shoot, it's been possible to host your own website for several years now. With IIS and Apache so easy to configure in default modes (there's even GUIs to configure apache in several linux distros), and dyndns.org, if you've got Cable or DSL internet you can host your own website.

The reason that hosting is still around is that people want their websites to be reliable, and don't want to mess with what happens to their cable/dsl/t-1 when they get digged or slashdotted. So what hosting companies are actually selling is reliabiility/uptime, convenience, and load tolerance.

Unfortunately, what may change the market *towards* home users -- at least in the crowd that's likely to get digged/slashdotted, is that most hosts become a royal pain in the *** under load, cancelling accounts and taking sites down and refusing to put them back up until the customer 'does something'. Hosts think that's perfectly appropriate -- but keep in mind that the owner of the site's gonna head over to digg and post in the comments, "Hey, thanks guys .. would love for you to be able to see my site, but "host x" took it down because of all the traffic. They suck. Anyone know of a good host that won't kill me for doing cool stuff?"

The growth market in web hosting right now is services and specialization. There's a million resellers and $5 hosts out there... with no guarantee that they'll be around tomorrow. The money's to be made in service hosting and higher availability. By service hosting, I mean offer developers Trac / Subversion hosting along with websites... there's a hundred small development companies out there that'll kill for that. Start developing niche applications, like a guy I know who wrote a webapp to help petsitters manage their clients and staff, and host their website ... and has fifty or sixty customers paying him $100 to $200/mo, and that's just with him working on it and hardly doing any marketing.

5-10 years from now, I'm not sure we'll recognize the web as we do now. Much of our online interaction might be in Second Life and similar. Look at how different Prodigy & AOL were in '95 from the web of today.

Thanks for all the info, guys! Keep it coming! There's some great stuff here. :)

One thing is for sure is that prices will continue to drop and much more kiddie hosts will emerge

One thing is for sure is that prices will continue to drop and much more kiddie hosts will emerge
Well, you have qualify your statement to what "type" of hosting you are talking about.

We've raised our prices several times in the last few years and for one of our brands, our cheapest price is now $24.95/month for a basic 50mb/1gb plan.

The only prices I see dropping are for those services trying to compete against each other on price alone.

My 2 cents...

If you're talking about the bulk of hosting, I think it will be entirely driven by advertising. Most people are unwilling or unable to do any kind of research, no matter how much someone might be willing to help them or how much information is available freely online. They will buy whatever is sold to them, so whoever has the biggest advertising budget will get the most sales, whether they're overselling, providing good support, providing manipulative information, etc. Of course, the general trend seems to be toward overselling and providing less reliable service.

I don't want to sound completely negative... in all fairness, many people with websites don't actually need reliability. They would prefer their site is always up, but if it is down for a week, it's not actually having an effect on them. In addition, hosting (like anything else) is a business of scale. The bigger companies really can provide a much better service because they can afford redundancy. They really can provide much more space/bandwidth/resources because they can use clustering, multiple data centers, etc. The really smart companies realize that the cost of a single host is trivial compared to the cost of advertising -- that means that you should be focused on how to keep customers rather than how to minimize the cost of a customer (actually, keeping a customer lowers the cost because it factors in how advertising to replace that customer).

I believe that this is true for the majority of people, but I think there are other substantial groups:
- People who receice lousy service to the point where they can't accomplish their goals will find out that they do need to be informed to find the right company. For most people, the goal of getting their website up and running can be met easily, but a business who has a week of downtime doesn't think their goals have been met.
- Other people have specific ideas that require technical skills such as design and development, even administration. I love this part, being a geek myself, but I have to admit that I don't think there is a huge need for custom services (at least compared to the hosting market as a whole).

On the tech side, I think virtualization is interesting. You can "virtualize" at a number of different levels; for example, you might think of reseller packages as a high level virtualized environment, and then there are a number of OS virtualization techniques -- each of which work for a different group of people.

I think virtualization will make dedicated services interesting. Who wants a physical machine when they might be able to use an existing virtualized environment where they can have 2 servers and pay based on the CPU utilization? Virtualizing networks and servers allows you to do lots of cool stuff relating to high availability, and you can build cool services (like those reseller packages...) on top of it.

Rather than buying a dedicated server or colocating, an advanced virtualized environment provides lots of control at a much lower price (think about the cost of server reboots -- first you use data center techs, then maybe a piece of hardware to remotely power cycle and view the 'console', and now even the OS can be rebooted and the console can be viewed over TCP).

So, yeah, I think virtualization will have a huge impact in the future (and already has had a big impact) and the virtual services are barely beginning to touch the surface.

Misc Other Thoughts:
- I talked about price before, and I think the numbers were mostly out of thin air, so I'll not give any sort of estimate other than "cheaper."
- Kiddie hosts: I don't know much about them and I honestly don't really care :) I've heard a lot about them and plenty of complaints on WHT, but I think their effect on the industry as a whole is close to nothing. If a few kids want to host some people, good for them. I had lots of fun learning about the details of stuff in my teens and providing a frilly service seems like giving up on the real fun stuff, but whatever makes them happy.
- Hosting from home: Sounds reasonable. I've heard this is pretty big already in South Korea, where they were smart enough to invest in the tech infrastructure. Sounds reasonable that a Home Package might exist eventually for people to have a user friendly Plesk/Cpanel-like interface for running their site from home -- certainly would make it available to a much broader market. I'm sure a few people here have seen some cool VMWare "appliances"...
- My HOPE is that Microsoft makes a big enough blunder that open source has better opportunities. I'd love to see open protocols replace Microsoft crap, and like many other areas, it's more about the underlying service provided by people implementing it.

As usual, my post seems to have turned in to rambling. I hope there are some useful bits in there and I didn't accidently include any useless buzzwords ;-)

Hosting industry is going where it is. I think most people who have been around WHT for a bit have seen it all. There hasn't been anything new to the shock-factor in a while now.

kiddie-hosts come kiddie hosts go. People who shouldn't be in the industry also come and go, but at the end of the day we're busy and thats all the matters.

Very interesting information indeed! Thanks so much! :)

There is alot of debate whether hosting will shift from the specialists domain to the common internet user, running a web server from his or her home.

I think whether this will happen largely depends on whether broadband companies embrace web hosting. At the moment, there is little or no inclination on their part because the demand from broadband users does not exist. But if the average demand rises from a broadband company's customer base, we very well could see webhosting being bundled as part of a customer's internet connection.

Whether this will happen, I can't say. But i'd be inclined to believe that is the future, and it will spell the end of the personal web hosting market... The hosts that will survive in this era will be hosts that continually adapt their offerings to target new and emerging areas of internet business...