The development of the IT infrastructure, cloud computing and virtualization technologies is bringing significant changes on the web hosting market. At the end of 90’s (last century) it was still possible for a small company located in Mexico, Portugal, Wales or any other to start offering web hosting services on the global market. Today it is still possible, but the competition is so tough and the hosting market is so saturated, that the only chance for smaller web hosting companies to grow is to be very active within the local communities.
“I own a small hosting/dedicated company in a town with a pop. around 20,000 people. I found that the market here while good but slow I have added services like Remote IT support and it seems to be the way things are going has anyone else found this to be true? CRA Hosting”, posted in Web Hosting Talk forums member “radams490”.
Another forum member – “Devileyezz” – asked about a local web hosting provider in Atlanta: “I had service with Serverbeach earlier. But now I’m looking for a local managed services provider in Atlanta. Preferably at 56 Marietta”, and he got answer from ServerBeach, a company now owned by PEER1.
It was not possible 10 years ago to found a typical “local web host”, one that serves customers in a specific geographical area and does not expand nationwide or global. The reason for this was simple – the IT infrastructure wasn’t that developed, the costs of data centers, collocation facilities and hardware was very high. An of course most people barely new what web hosting is. Ten years ago some people used e-mail. Today each member of a family of four has their own e-mail address. Some families even have more than one blog on their account.
Today most people use e-mail, photo gallery, web calendar, any form of blog and many other web services that I can not list here. IF you wonder what kind of services people use only, just go to Google. You’ll be surprised how many services the Search engine provides, most of them free of charge.
Web Hosting – Global Business, But On Local Markets
One of the main reasons to have so many web hosting companies in Europe which no one knows outside their own towns and countries is that they specialize in service local communities. Of course the language barrier is a huge obstacle web hosting market in Europe to globalize. In Canada and UK however where there is no such factor, and especially in the United States, where hosting market is “globalized by default” is a growing number of small companies that succeed not just to compete national brands but to kick them off the local markets.
It is not possible for corporate players to serve the local market the way a home town boy can! Any small business can better understand the needs of its customers and to create a hosting service model that better serves them. Mike who lives 3 blocks away from Bob, knows much better what Bob needs for its local business than any corporation, no matter how many analysts it has.
Hosting corporations however can provide local web host with infrastructure and data center services. It is much more affordable for any corporate structure in hosting industry to deploy technologies and to offer them at wholesale [rices, instead of serving and supporting individuals.
The development cloud computing model and its implementation in web hosting industry give more opportunities to those local businesses that can build strong business relationship with their customers. However those web hosts that operate in the global hosting market, but provide nothing but standardized cheap hosting services would loose their market share in favor of big clouds.
