Liam Eagle: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

A great deal of the success in the Web hosting business has to do with timing – reacting to a product or application whose popularity is breaking into the mainstream. Plenty of very successful hosting providers made their marks by picking the right moment to jump on a hosting need – the reseller program, e-commerce tools, VPS, the discount dedicated server or blogging, in a more recent example.

Hosts, of course, are always looking for the next big thing. Hot hosting products have a way of becoming industry-standard in a matter of months. And nobody’s going to make a big splash tomorrow by providing e-commerce tools.

This makes online gaming a particularly interesting market for hosting. With the immense popularity of multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and the earnest push of console games into the online world with Microsoft’s Live network, gaming is a huge market for hosting and Internet services. But it has no business application.

While the early adopters are still ironing out the specific business value of blogging, most of us assume it’s there somewhere. And six months from now more or less every small business Web host will offer some kind of blogging tool. I doubt, however, that many executives could find a reason to set employees up with Counter-Strike.

Game hosting doesn’t quite fit with existing services. It’s not a complement to a blog or an e-commerce storefront. It’s an entirely different animal. But it’s an enormous market for hosting services that is only going to get bigger. And now is the moment to jump on that need.

In this month’s cover story, WHIR regular Dennis McCafferty explores the various, and very different, facets of the online gaming market and examines the work of some of the hosting providers that have set out to meet that demand. And it is considerable – subscription revenue from online games was $2 billion in 2005 and is expected to grow to $6.8 billion by 2011. And while hosting the biggest beneficiaries of that revenue is already the work of major organizations like AT&T, there is room for smaller operators to make their mark offering access to even a single gaming server.

In a separate feature, we examine how a smaller host might set itself up to host online games, examining some of the services involved, such as the control panels that might operate those servers.

There isn’t much doubt that online gaming is the future of electronic games in general. One might even say that multiplayer is the natural progress of the medium, and the Internet is making that possible, and making gaming an enormous market for hosting. The time for Web hosts to seek out their role in the game hosting market is right now.

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