Web Hosting Companies Face New Demand in 2005 Offerings

In the past year, that has changed so drastically that one large hosting company is having to re-evaluate its business model.

"The advent of Blogging and flawlessly-easy-home-web publishing has sent a surge of new demand through the hosting industry," according to CTO Michael Brunson, who oversees Zipa.com's hosting operation.

Today, millions more people are posting content online and don't even think of it. The fearsome HTML programs of the past are being quickly outnumbered by non-traditional ways to make web publishing happen via emails, Blog software, online website generators and even instant messenger programs.

"Looking ahead, we found ourselves forced to deal with this reality sooner than later. It'd be nice to stay in the comfort of zone of 20 meg shared hosting accounts, but we've decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and introduce gigabyte hosting plans that start at $10 a month for two gigs; $50, for 10 gigs."

"The old quotas of 10 or 20 megs of disk space were nice," Brunson said. "But that isn't cutting it anymore. The definition of 'Webmaster' is changing to become much more inclusive. Average Internet users are demanding web space for everything from posting family photo albums to backing up their computers. We're talking about gigabytes of space now, not megabytes."

While the cost of disk space has decreased over the years, it's not been as dramatic as the increase in demand for online storage space.