Hosting Industry Year 2003 in Retrospection

HostReview.com
Wednesday, December 31, 2003; 12:00 AM

By Milena Sotirova
Editor DevStart, Inc.

At the end of each year, HostReview draws upon our industry leaders to frame the picture for the future of the industry. With so many achievements in the past, we look at the trends and how they will affect the future. Those trends, including new technology launches, successful acquisitions, lowed prices and bettered service support, are all elements the experts have used in their company's growth and expansion in 2003 and will continue to in 2004.

John Zdanowski, Vice President of Product Management, Affinity:

The challenges any company in this industry will face are how to cost effectively run the business, while still providing customers with non-stop good service and technical support.

That's why we built our Affinity Hosting Platform, a clustered server environment that allows us to continually add thousands of customers at a time without affecting our ability to provide continuous uptime and superior customer support.

Any hosting company better have a rock-solid infrastructure, excellent customer support and scalability if it wants to compete in this business in the future.

Mark Lee, V.P. of marketing Dept., ANhosts.com:

With the development of new tools available, hosting is becoming easier to use for anyone. In 10 years, every household will have their own .com.

Ivan Vachovsky, President and CEO, Aplus.Net:

The web hosting industry is clearly saturated. Consolidation is inevitable for the industry. At the end of the day there will be far fewer players - and only the stronger players will remain.

Sampson Lo, Marketing and Sales Director, B2B Booster, Inc.:

Nowadays, most household own at least one computer, with available access to the internet, I believe the hosting industry will continue to thrive. Another factor why the hosting industry will thrive is due to the recent economy. Inflation -> need side job, Sell from home -> small start-up cost.

Steve Dauber, Vice President of Marketing, Ensim Corporation:

For a long time, hosting software has focused on the cost side of the hosting business, automating the tasks associated with offering relatively generic web sites. This has contributed to the ever increasing commoditization of the web hosting market.

We believe that hosting software needs to provide increasing value on the revenue side of the business, allowing service providers to offer differentiated, higher value hosting services to their customers. That's why we built Ensim Power Tools, it's why we built Ensim Unify, and it's a guiding principle that you'll see in other Ensim offerings coming out in 2004.

Kaumil Patel, President, HostingPlex:

The dedicated server market, especially the new low-end $99 dedicated server market is going to see the biggest growth, for 2004.

John Lee, Director of Marketing, Hostway:

Companies that do not have the innovation, knowledge, or stability to compete in such a competitive industry are being eliminated. For the rest of 2003, I expect this to continue happening, which ultimately will come down to the "the survival of the fittest" rule. Companies really have to determine their value-add to the market, and if they do not have the answer, their time will be up soon. This market shakeout works well for Hostway because we expect to be one of the last providers left standing and will eventually accrue market share from the weaker less responsible players.

Trey Gardner, Marketing Manager, iPowerWeb:

We feel that in 2003 with the additional features we will offer our
customers, in addition to our already terrific membership plan, that we will acquire a large amount of new customers from the hosting
marketplace as well as sign up many members who are new to web site hosting.

Maximiliam C. Andersen, Director of Strategy and Development, Lunarpages:

The most challenging thing is the bad reputation that some other hosting companies have left with their customers. Customers almost expect poor response times or a lack of support for the issues they have.

Michael Gold, CEO, Sphera:

We are focused on the high-volume hosting provider, who need greater automation and the ability to deliver more meaningful SLAs, and know that we are best suited to gain market share in the telco and enterprise sector. We have developed a formidable product and it's just a matter of focusing more on sales and marketing.

Curtis R. Curtis, VP of Sales & Marketing, Superb Internet Corp.:

Superb Internet has played a pro-active role in the hosting
marketplace, often introducing leading-edge technologies but if I had to sum up all that we bring to the marketplace, I would have to say it is our superior customer service and focus on ensuring that our customers receive the highest quality hosting experiences possible.