It’s a safe bet that the Web hosting industry of the future will look very different from the one today’s hosting providers are used to, and that’s certainly cause enough.

Over the past year, plenty of signs have emerged that indicate the face of Web hosting is already starting to stretch and shift in new directions. No, the new winds of change include acquisitions of companies that deliver more than just additional hosting customers, a fresh generation of startups that look nothing like your father’s Web hosting company, and experiments with innovative ways to sell hosting to the next wave of customers.

Of course, there’s still plenty of activity in the garden-variety host-to-host acquisition arena, too: 2001 - 2002 saw more M&A headlines than either of the previous two years, and 2003 is showing all signs of that trend continuing. The future of SME hosting gets even more interesting when you factor in the small-business hosting forays of ‘Net service providers like Yahoo!

That explains the growing number of hosting providers that are expanding their services, implementing automation tools, adding site-design tools or wizards, and making e-commerce a standard offering, even with entry-level plans.

If your web site isn’t being served up every single time a visitor requests it why do you have a web site?

Tags: Business and Economy, Electronic commerce, Service provider, Web Design and Development, Web hosting service, Website, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Future of Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.