I've been reading "Why Not?", a book about innovation. One of its key concepts is to ask yourself what Croesus (the ancient rich king) would do. In other words, if you could throw unlimited amounts of money at a problem, what solution would you pick?
Web-hosting-wise (unless you're Google), maybe a more practical approach is to ask what Robert Marsh would do. As founder/Head Surfer of EV1, Robert single-handedly created the discount dedicated servers market. He also popularized complex hosting among EV1 customers by introducing private racks, and rolled out VPSes with a BIG party, complete with fireworks.
He blogged (sort of) before blogging was fashionable (by making a personal soapbox out of his customer forum). He saw potential in APC's Mobile Data Center before Sun made a splash with the Blackbox. He wanted to travel regularly to cities with high customer density - much like what Amazon Web Services evangelists are doing. And he put some work into developing a beyond-the-box hosting environment, which so many hosting companies began offering last year.
I've compiled a quick collection of facts and stats that I think will define web hosting in 2007. (If you're reading in RSS and the slides don't show, click here.) If Robert were still in the hosting business, what would he do in today's market?
Would he build his own S3? At least two Rackspace customers have traded their managed storage for Amazon's pay-per-GB solution - and just this morning my new friend Santosh asked which hosting companies offer S3-like shared storage. What should I tell him??
Might he take Tier 1 Research analyst Dan Golding's advice and snap up a start-up CDN? Buy a shipyard and offer container colo for Sun Blackbox owners?
He'd have another Birthday Bash, that's for sure. Or several parties in different cities - he'd drive his mobile data center right up to the entrance of not just HostingCon, but Salesforce.com's and VMWare's user conferences. Did you know that 7000+ people attend each? And they work for companies that could become your customers!
The most interesting figure (on slide #18), BTW, comes from Vlad Miloushev of 3tera. Vlad thinks up to 90% of web servers are hosted in-house. Robert wanted to go after this market with not just private racks, but private suites.
What else? Who knows. If I were you, I'd take the guy to Fleming's the next time you're in Houston. He might have some insights for you!
Very informative slideshow. Could you elaborate a bit on slide number 17? I'm really curious to know why you feel each of those 5 hosting companies will be likely winners in 2007.
Not only is the slideshow technology cool, the slides themselves are great. Had I seen slide six before I posted my own blog entry today, I would have linked to this for sure.
Scott - My choices were less about the companies in particular than their strategies in general. For instance, I think Rackspace will have continued success with Fanatical Support - but they need not be the only hosting provider that wins customers based on exceptional service. So I guess the title of that slide is sort of misleading. It should say something like "winning tactics you should consider".
Liam - Isn't Slideshare awesome? You upload a Powerpoint file and they automatically convert it. I see Slideshare as a new kind of shared hosting company, BTW - along with MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. After all, don't they offer bandwidth and storage space and cater to people who want to put stuff online? Why aren't traditional hosting companies coming up with ideas like that? Or winning Slideshare's storage business, at least? (They're at AboveNet and use S3.)
As for slide #6, it's pretty discouraging. It takes more than marketing dollars to drive relevancy and stickiness.
Really interesting slideshow. And you demonstrated the value proposition of user-generated media in delivering a message. Your slideshow is number two on Slideshare's "Most Popular" page:
Exceptional service is a "winning tactic you should consider". I totally agree with you when thinking about yesterday's hosting industry, and to a lesser extent, today's hosting industry. However, I do wonder how much of role exceptional service will play in the future of web hosting and whether exceptional service is (by itself) a winning tactic going forward.
Exceptional service was absolutely necessary back in the early days of hosting (having someone on call 24x7x365 to replace any failed hardware component at a moment's notice). I feel that this was the main benefit (excluding datacenter management) of hosting at that time.
Today, exceptional service is also necessary as customers are still expected (for the most part) to install, configure, and maintain any software application they choose to run. Most hosting providers will provide at least some support for the most popular software, and the real difference between them (other than cost) seems to be what level of support they will provide for said software.
But what of tomorrow's hosting industry? Consider the Slideshare application you used to host your "2007 Web Hosting Industry Outlook" presentation. I assume you didn't have to worry about hardware at all when making your hosting choice. The same can probably be said of software as well (you don't have to configure apache to use Slideshare). How much of a factor was exceptional service in your choice of hosting? Once you take for granted that you aren't going to have to worry about hosting, does exceptional service (having someone on call 24x7x365 for when something goes wrong) still drive your hosting decision?
Will exceptional service (as a key differentiator) still be as valuable to web hosting companies going forward?
Isabel Wang. a 10 year Web hosting veteran, examines the impact emerging Web
technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of
hosting consumers. Click here to read her full biography.
Not only is the slideshow technology cool, the slides themselves are great. Had I seen slide six before I posted my own blog entry today, I would have linked to this for sure.
Liam - Isn't Slideshare awesome? You upload a Powerpoint file and they automatically convert it. I see Slideshare as a new kind of shared hosting company, BTW - along with MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. After all, don't they offer bandwidth and storage space and cater to people who want to put stuff online? Why aren't traditional hosting companies coming up with ideas like that? Or winning Slideshare's storage business, at least? (They're at AboveNet and use S3.)
As for slide #6, it's pretty discouraging. It takes more than marketing dollars to drive relevancy and stickiness.
http://www.slideshare.net/popular
http://newteevee.com/2006/12/29/your-ad-at-the-sup...
As for slideshow popularity, the flying cats have me beat by a factor of 472 :)
http://www.slideshare.net/EGK/cats
Exceptional service was absolutely necessary back in the early days of hosting (having someone on call 24x7x365 to replace any failed hardware component at a moment's notice). I feel that this was the main benefit (excluding datacenter management) of hosting at that time.
Today, exceptional service is also necessary as customers are still expected (for the most part) to install, configure, and maintain any software application they choose to run. Most hosting providers will provide at least some support for the most popular software, and the real difference between them (other than cost) seems to be what level of support they will provide for said software.
But what of tomorrow's hosting industry? Consider the Slideshare application you used to host your "2007 Web Hosting Industry Outlook" presentation. I assume you didn't have to worry about hardware at all when making your hosting choice. The same can probably be said of software as well (you don't have to configure apache to use Slideshare). How much of a factor was exceptional service in your choice of hosting? Once you take for granted that you aren't going to have to worry about hosting, does exceptional service (having someone on call 24x7x365 for when something goes wrong) still drive your hosting decision?
Will exceptional service (as a key differentiator) still be as valuable to web hosting companies going forward?
http://www.thewhir.com/blogs/isabel-wang/index.cfm...