This thread realy shows how small most hosts are on WHT.
You need to understand what Aussie-Bob means, this industry is indeed set to vanish within a decade, not that hosting itself will die, but how hosting is sold and provided is seriously under threat.
We are seeing a rise in specialized hosting sites, say photobucket for people who only need image hosting, NING for application deployment, and who knows, tomorrow Google and Microsoft ?.
Somebody there said “your family, friends and their friends will want to host with you” .. true .. but then you have no ambition, thats no different than selling hot dogs on a trolley, but thinking your a restaurant.
Somebody else pointed the obvious rise in Broadband speeds … nice isn’t it ?, I wonder how long before you can host your own “myspace” kind of site on your XBOX.
And of course, today’s photobucket and myspace are tomorrow’s Google’s Bucket-of-Picures and MSN Spaces … the big keep on buying and growing .. and the small keep on being left behind.
The mid-sized hosts today are on a frantic quest to buy each others, and tomorrow they themselves are set to be bought, consolidation is the only way to fight the giants who will show up in the next few years, to think anything less is to bury your head in the sand and hope for the best.
Web Hosting will become easier to signup for, easier to use, and a part of everyday live, the digital generation shares online photo-albums as once before people sent postcards, emails is to be the only way to contact others, and this is to become even bigger and greater .. but make no mistaque, this is not “web hosting” as one knows it, people will not be loging in to a Cpanel/Plesk/H-sphere accoutn to do it so, or bothering with browsing the web foo fony hosting directories to tell them with who they should host (AKA, who paid them the most), they will be logging to streamlined, dull and idiot-proof versions of it created by the “giants”, with specialized “hosting” sections for whatever your need is, the bill ?, most likely bundled with their electric bill or something blase like that (or free).
Users wont know whats “bandwidth” and “disk space” .. yes, Unlimited is the future, but of course, provided by companies who really mean it, not some pimpled face on a VPS offering what he doesn’t have.
It is evident that a certain percentage of the business is still to be run by the small entrepreneur, there is always space for small biz to make a buck, but the day that you can go to .. say “google” .. and click on “my site”, alongside “my pictures, my mail, my calendar, my maps … etc” is the day that huge chunk of less than tech savy, or that other chuck of clients that simply do not have the time or the patience to deal with a fantastico or easyapps script cancel their web hosting subscription.
The fact of the matter is .. will “web hosting” as we know it survive ? or will it evolve into something else .. I am willing to bet it will evolve.
Technorati Tags: WebHosting
Far be it from me to guess what the web will be like in 10 years time, but there is one problem with this argument, namley that its based on the existance of generic applications.
While its true that more and more providers are going to offer generic applications to handle photos, blogs, and I am sure hosted stores are not far off – this is a far cry from the individuality that most real only sites need.
The myspaces of this world are not really new. Myspace is simply replacing geocities – amateurish websites with some social networking added to it. These people where never in the market for paid hosting in the first place so I don’t think this is a loss.
I think few people actually paid for hosting to put their photo albums online. The people that did are likely people selling their photos. Maybe a few of these will move to flickr, but I am not convinced.
One thing about these hosted apps is they are very much consumer facing – they are mass market. I wonder if the people that currently buy hosting will ever feel comfortable in that sort of environment.
Chris
You are already seeing a huge exodus from regular hosting to services like “Photobucket”.. the truth is, the vast majority of people do not need a full fledge web hosting account, they need certain functionalities of it.
I am not saying “web hosting” ceases to exist, I just think how it’s sold is it change.
I currently have notice a huge increase in interest on high-availability setups, what some larger/corporate hosts are realising also is that in order to prevail for year to come, you need to go after your more demanding client, who would never dream of using a free or cheap service, and for them, you need to offer an advantage over those same services, and proper redundancy is one of they Keys.
And yes, your right, people dont pay to share things like Online Photo Albums, why should they ?? with services like Flick beeing free ..
My point is, the “web hosting” as we know it, the free for all gold rush that it was is going to die, the $1 per month offers will continue to be replaced by free and specialized sites, while the higher end gets more and more consilidated (with hosts buying each others) and specializing on high-availability for the corporate/demanding user.
Ahhh .. but here’s the rub. Flickr istn’t free, its free for the most basic usage but thats only to show I think 100 photos. They also have strict upload limits for the free account. After that you start paying, sure it’s onlhy $25/month but you still pay and even then there are limits on how much you can upload.
More and more of these “killer” apps are going to come along, all wanted a cut of the subscription pie. Perhaps webhosting will move into providing a range of applications to handle all these things directly.
As we have talked about before, I see webhosting moving more to the idea of application hosting (which is really all that flickr etc are), but with people still being able to retain some control over the application. Personally, I wouldn’t want to trust flickr to handle all my photos – who knows what may happen to them in the future, in the same way I don’t want gmail to handle my email.
I agree with you about business sites, and perhaps this is the key. There may be less of a demand for the $5/monthly sites in the future but the sales of dedicated servers and specalised setups is escalating – rapidly. Just seeing the amount of new forums being setup over at vbulletin every day, there is still massive growth in some aspects of the industry, growth that I think is still set to continue.
Your right on the money there, “Application Hosting” is indeed a chuck of the business in the future, funny also, if you think thats what big hosts were trying to go for in the mid-late 90’s.
“Web Hosting” as spoken on WHT is the $5 /month scenario, thats the one I honestly thing it’s in dire straights, and will eventually be absorved by the google’s, M$, and Flick’s .. the rest of the industry need to accomodate the corporate and high demand client.
I am personally putting my money where my mouth is, the Guys at Relio (Rob, Justin, etc) are now pricing a NFS solution for the Relio cluster, in 2007 I intend to go the load balancing/redundancy route.
Yeah, i agree. There is one other factor here though, the success of things like flickr, myspace etc is that more and more people are likeing the idea of having their “own website”. Myspace is a good example, it started our particularly strongly as a website for bands, and there are lots of bands on there now. However, once these people get used to having a small website they often then go and setup a normal website so they can have something on it they can’t on my space. Myspace and the likes can help bring people who never even thought about having a website into getting one. Its the role geocities used to play (or say how ezboard acts as a feeder for vBulletin).
Add this to things like flickr where people are getting more and more used to the idea of paying something for online services and perhaps there is still room for some sort of growth just down to the number of people trying to get sites.
The killer will be if MSN spaces or Google actually launch a real hosting platform which is free/nominal charge. Personally I doubt they will in the short term although they may bring more of their apps together to make a sort of website. I still think there is going to be demand for these cheap sites for a while yet.
There is one other factor at play here, that a lot of the “Web 2.0” properties have started out as hosted applications that people are naturally going to. However, the downloadable apps are catching on. There is currently no “flickr” that you can install on your server, but there will be (minus some of the community aspects at all but lots of people don’t want that). Basecamp is a good example, its a simple web based app of which there is now downloadable comparison so people use it, until something like ActiveColab comes along and allows you to get basecamp like functionality on your own server.
Thats where our opinions diverge, I see MSN and Google (expecially Google) not be too far from a real hosting offer.
Hopefully I am wrong, I have been wrong before, ever meet my ex-wife ?
Chris – I’m not sure very many of Flickr/Basecamp’s users would want to (or know how to) download those apps and install them on their own servers. You say you’d rather not host your email with Google, because who knows what may happen to them in the future. But doesn’t the same uncertainty affect whatever data center you’re hosted with?
Well I can see where you are coming from, sure its going be the end of the “little” guy but the big hosting solutions will never go away.
They will away be able to offer better resources, serves and speeds than the “normal” average jo will have access to.
Alojamento
De facto os provedores com mais recursos serao capazes de sobreviver dado que pode oferecer servicos que o provedor pequeno nao pode, por este mesmo factor, e que estamos a desenvolver a seguinte solucao.. clica e le 🙂
http://nullmind.com/2007/01/06/relio-is-going-halbgrid