December 31, 2008 -- (HOSTSEARCH.COM) -- "A cataclysmic year that brought change of almost biblical proportions," is how one web hosting company representative we know described 2008. Although he was perhaps overstating the case a little, the fact is future generations will view 2008 as we currently view 1929 - as being the start of the great depression of the 1930s. What started as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac having a few problems with sub-prime mortgages, quite literally erupted into a global recession that will impact every branch of industry and (e)commerce, if indeed it hasn't already. How long it will last, nobody knows. Likewise, exactly the change it will inflict on us is anyone's guess. The only thing we do know is "Change has come" and hopefully those lining up for power in the United States have some idea how to guide an ailing planet back to both economic and environmental health.
What's in store for the web hosting industry in 2009? It's difficult to say - although
Derek Vaughan's recent HostSearch article gives us some insights. We do know that 2008 was the year that was, and it was a year that independent research firm Tier1 launched a 62-page research report suggesting web hosting was under pressure from a range of factors, including the "proliferation of wireless and broadband access, web-enabled mobile devices, and the movement of personal and business lives to an online environment". As ever, acquisitions and partnerships in 2008 continued to contract the industry with more and more going into the hands of fewer and fewer companies.
What sort of year would it be in web hosting without a Go Daddy controversy? In 2008 a few "beavers" got in the way Go Daddy's Super Bowl commercial, although the powers that be did eventually give another version of the commercial the green light. 2008 also saw SWsoft do a pretty decent job of solidifying its name change to Parallels. It was also a year Easyspace stepped to give the UK's "worst website" a makeover!
In 2008 Yahoo! began offering unlimited web hosting -- and that meant really unlimited... meaning you pay for nothing extra... Of course, completely overshadowing this news was Microsoft's submission of an unsolicited proposal to purchase Yahoo! Those two companies joining hands would almost certainly have changed the shape of web hosting, but the bid was by declined by Jerry Yang -- a response that caused US pension funds to sue Yahoo! Microsoft's bid would have given Yahoo! shareholders $33 a share. By November the company's shares had gone down to the $10 mark. Understandably, Jerry Yang decided to leave Yahoo!'s CEO position. Announcing the news Yahoo!'s Press Room offered a release suggesting that over a year and a half "
Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! ..." which of course was the greatest understatement uttered in the whole of 2008!
It was good to see that the green revolution kept marching on in 2008, with numerous high profile companies tackling their carbon footprint. To name but a few, The Planet announced the results of its green initiative in 2008 while Crucial Paradigm Australia also announced it was bolstering its 'green hosting' initiative and Hosting.com showed its green credentials. In addition, IBM helped RackForce and gigaCENTER Networks build Canada's largest green data center, ServInt promoted climate-positive web hosting with a new green initiative, and EvoSwitch announced the opening of a newly expanded green data center.Going green is important for web hosting, because ecommerce is becoming more and more mainstream.
AIT crunched some numbers and it seems things are so "online" these days that online shopping figures now equal those of "brick and mortar" businesses. Perhaps a chicken and egg scenario here - whether this fact led to its growth or the other way round is difficult to say, but in 2008 the buzz was the "Cloud", and it was very much a precursor to what many believe will be "the year of the Cloud" in 2009. To give but a few of so many examples, March saw the launch of Amazon's EC2 while Layered Technologies raised $11 million to bump up its "on-demand" hosting provision. In addition, the Richmond boys also announced plans to expand Microsoft online services for businesses of all sizes and also planned to buy some datacenters to fuel its growth. In September alone, 3Tera, Inc. announced global cloud services, 3Tera and Citrix partnered on cloud computing, and Hosting.com announced a Cloud Computing solution general release. In addition, managed services provider eLINIA launched a "Cloud" storage service.
Bucking the trend of limited IT IPOs in 2008, Rackspace's move in that direction unfortunately didn't go exactly as was planned, although the company is still fairing very well. What did maintain its direction in 2008 was the quiet sensation of telcos getting into web hosting, evidenced by AT&T Inc. offering web hosting services to small- to medium-sized businesses. In addition, anyone with any excess resources suddenly realized they could get into hosting.
MYOB, for example, began offering domains and web hosting alongside their accounting software options. It was also a year when Microsoft decided it did like the idea of web-streamed MS Office after all.
Although not directly related to web hosting, in 2008 the world saw Mozilla's noble efforts to get into the record books on "Download Day" and later in the year Google came back with Chrome, which it described as "an operating system for the Internet". Chrome quickly leapfrogged the likes of Opera in terms of usage, although the market is still dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 6. 2008 was also a year that Google was told by tyBit^(TM) and
Cuil to get ready for some competition. To what extent these new search engines made any inroads into Google's market is open to debate. What we can say for certain is that in 2008 Google edged closer and closer to following Microsoft and Yahoo! in becoming a full-blown web host with Google Sites. Should this occur, and they do become a host, it will have enormous implications for the future of the industry. But we digress...
July saw web hosting's annual shindig and get together take place, and it was a special HostingCon indeed. Microsoft showcased Hyper-V adoption and the company announced that it would be offering hosted versions of its Exchange and SharePoint solutions. What exactly the web hosts who have forged businesses around offering these services make of Microsoft becoming a direct competitor, the lord only knows! In addition, HostingCon saw the launch of the first-ever trade association for Internet and hosting service providers. AIHSP -- as it was called -- aimed to bring cohesion to an often disparate industry and offer guidelines that web hosts would have to adhere to or face the consequences. Hopefully, the economic changes 2008 saw won't impact this initiative too much as in our book, it was extremely important and potentially pivotal for the industry.
All in all, 2008 was nothing less than eventful -- let's hope 2009 ushers in economic recovery and continued growth for the web hosting industry.
From everyone at HostSearch.com, here's hoping the best for the New Year!
