Website Hosting in 2009

Rob Lovell runs the Worldwide Partnership Program for virtualization firm Parallels. Rob spends most of his time interacting with a broad range of web hosting companies. Here is what Rob sees coming in 2009, ``Website hosting for the consumer will continue to consolidate and commoditize. The big few really are now established and entrances to the market from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft will impact the lower end of the hosting market considerably. I think that web hosters in the small business area will see a dramatic expansion of their services away from just web hosting and domain names, to software and services. Low attrition services are required for companies to continue to grow rapidly in the industry, and with hosting companies already having a huge network of customers, they can simply add on services to suit. For Parallels, we will continue to address our service provider partners, focusing on enabling them to tackle the next step services such as Software as a Service and VOIP.``

Daniel Foster is a co-founder and principal with vps hosting firm 34sp.com. The company is based in Manchester, England and has a strong presence in the UK market. Mr. Foster has been at the helm of his hosting enterprise since the year 2000 and has seen many changes in the website hosting industry. Here is his forecast on hosting for the New Year, ``In 2009, I`m sure there will be more buzz about cloud and utility computing. I`m also sure that "traditional" hosting companies which are good at what they do will continue to thrive. Not everyone has the technical expertise to manage a complex hosting solution so hosts that can provide solutions relevant to their customers should continue to see growth. At 34SP.com, we`re expecting to see our growth continue in 2009, and to be able to offer even better service and solutions to our existing and new customers alike.``

Stacy Griggs is Vice President in charge of sales with HostMySite.com and speculates that mergers and the cost of capital will impact 2009, ``Companies that were dependent on a low cost of capital will struggle as capital will be tougher to get and a lot more expensive. I also believe that managed dedicated servers and colocation growth will be surprisingly strong. It also seems likely that mergers and acquisitions will heat up. What is HostMySite.com expecting in 2009? Growth and expansion, as we are well capitalized and looking to take advantage of it.``

Mr. Grigg`s compatriot at HostMySite.com - Vice President of Marketing and Product Development, Robert Cassidy - echoes his bullish assessment of the company`s prospects in 2009, ``Fortunately the economics of outsourcing web hosting, for businesses of all types and sizes, remain very compelling. We are cautious in our planning but feel there is huge upside and opportunity for quality hosting providers in 2009. Customers continue to come to the web for information, entertainment, purchases and operational efficiency. Utilization based pricing, consolidation, and partnerships will continue to keep the hosting industry exciting and evolving quickly in 2009. HostMySite has a long legacy of being a trusted partner and staying true to simply building a great business. We will continue to expand our managed services offerings and our geographic footprint. We will focus energy building highly extensible internal systems and platform infrastructure that will help us partner and grow quickly. We will continue to listen closely to our customers so we understand their needs today (not last year).``

Nils Decker, Chief Marketing Officer with SpamExperts B.V. prognosticated, ``Since SpamExperts acts as a service provider to hosters rather than being a host itself, we are not directly involved in the trends of global hosting. However, what we continuously do hear from customers both in Central Europe and from overseas, is a need for managing peaks in traffic as well as a need for a value-for-money solution to handle such peaks. Besides virtualization, SpamExperts expects cloud computing to play a vital role in that in 2009.`` As for what the company expects to see in 2009 Mr. Decker added, ``Having managed to become the market leader in hosting provider and ISP spamfiltering in the Netherlands in less than one year, SpamExperts aims to achieve this position in more markets both in Europe and the U.S. SpamExperts has not and does not expect to be affected by the global financial crisis; quite the opposite: saving costs by outsourcing specialized niche-services to third-parties will prove to become ever more required for webhosts that aim to excel for their customers in 2009.``

So our experts are quite upbeat on the prospects for both the website hosting industry as a whole and each of their individual businesses going into the New Year. Whatever the future may hold in these unusual and unpredictable business times, Hostsearch wishes you all the best for prosperity, happiness and success in 2009.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for HostSearch.