Liam Eagle: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

I talk a lot about the “Web hosting community” these days. I admit, it has become a
bit of a fascination for me. Launching, and working on, the print magazine, I feel, has
brought theWHIR closer to the Web hosting community in a certain intangible way.

Working on this issue, however, and particularly on our Ten Turning Points feature,
gave me the most tangible sense of community I’ve had in the years I’ve spent
covering this business.

Approaching our panel of experts, following up, reading their input and discussing
their choices with them meant that, for a period of several weeks, I was in very regular
contact with some of the brightest and most insightful people working in Web
hosting.

Distilling their considerable contribution into the material that makes up this issue
was a diffi cult task. And we are very grateful for their involvement. Even those who,
for various reasons, were not able to contribute were extremely helpful in developing
our features.

We’ve given each of the ten turning points that most captured our panel’s attention
its own feature treatment, illustrating that particular point’s infl uence as we attempt
to map out hosting history.

In creating the features, we turned to our own community of contributors. Max
Smetannikov offers a take on automation, Jay Lyman covers discount dedicated
hosting and Dennis McCafferty pens pieces on the dot-com boom and bust and the
reseller hosting model. Esther M. Bauer contributed a piece on site building tools and
Wayne Epperson examines the rise and fall of Exodus Communications.

Our staff writers work their way into the list as well, as Philbert Shih highlights
the spread of affordable bandwidth and the Web hosting price war and Justin Lee
remarks on the signifi cance of WebHostingTalk. Finally, I contribute a piece on the free
hosting era, and its end.