Dan Golding, Tier 1’s Vice president and research director, told the audience at “Hosting Transformation – 2008 and Beyond” conference that “hosting providers should focus on providing services that SMBs couldn’t, or wouldn’t, provide to themselves”.

This is true in a world where many professionals still don’t use e-mail under their own domain name. Even in United States. A friend of mine, CPA who works in New York, told me he does not need to use his own branded e-mail because it is more convinient for him to use one in Yahoo. I wasn’t able to persuade him that his firm would attract more clients if he had a good looking website.

When it comes to web hosting we can say that the future belongs to those companies who are good enough to invent and implement a product or service and to persuade more people to use it. Sometimes it can be a completely useless thing such as … tamagochi. Do you remember small handheld “digital pet”? It came out in 1996 and millions accross the globe went crazy about it.

Any kind of service or product can become trendy in shared web hosting market. What a company needs is a good idea. One that works is SitePal. The company which released the service gave to the dot-com business a good example of money-making idea which entertained many online. So if you are web host or dot-com business owner you have an example for “key to success”. Invent a service or product which makes people to feel good or just give them something handy.

Business Hosting Providers Need Different Approach

I would suggest anyone who runs Linux based web host to spend some time to find why does Microsoft’s share in the server hosting market increase. I think that Microsoft has better approach to tech businesses in general. It is focused to deliver “community hosting” services that serve good to workgroups and networks of users. I doubt that Windows is better or more reliable server OS than Linux but it enables businesses to organize their work using exchange server. And this is a good reason for many SMB’s to pay more for Microsoft exchange hosting than to use a cheaper Linux based solution.

I remember that one of the serious hosting industry’s analysis said in 2006 that the growing number of SMB’s who want to outsource their hosted solutions brings growth to US and Canadian web hosting markets. So just think about how to attract more business to chose your company for their business hosting partner.