Liam Eagle: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

In keeping with the time of year known as “back to school,” we decided it would be a
good time to focus our attention on education,
and its relationship with Web hosting.

Given the diversity of experiences in education,
and the variety of applications of
Web hosting technology, there was plenty
of material to cover.

The foundation, of course, is Web hosting’s
relationship with the education business.
And a big part of that relationship is the
enabling of learning beyond the traditional
classroom environment.

In his feature on online learning, regular WHIR
contributor Dennis McCaff erty peers under the
hood of some of the largest online classroom
environments, an enormous and growing market
for Web hosting services. Web collaboration
technologies are becoming key tools at corporations
around the world, and those corporations
are beginning to employ those technologies
in training their employees. E-learning can fi t
into the schedules of regular offi ce workers, deliver
coursework to remote locations and adapt
quickly to meet new challenges. And Web hosts
can help to defi ne e-learning even as they sign
on to deliver it.

Besides its relationship with the institution of
education, Web hosting has relationships with
its individual participants – the students and
teachers. In her feature on hosting in the classroom,
WHIR regular Esther Bauer discusses the
story of Lunarpages, a Web hosting provider that
launched a free hosting package for educators
and watched it snowball into a division serving
an estimated 30,000 teachers around the US.

And Web hosts have their own uses for education.
Employees must remain certified with
regard to certain technologies and educated
in a Web host’s own offerings. In his feature
on on-the-job training, regular contributor
Wayne Epperson off ers insight into how some
of the most successful players in the hosting
business regard certifi cation as an indicator
of a potential employee’s skills, and how they
employ training systems developed in house
to advance their employees’ knowledge.

Finally, Web hosts stand to benefit tremendously
from educating their own customers. In
a feature on turning to tutorials, Carl Burnham
examines the impact that employing thirdparty
tutorials can have on a hosting business
- reducing the support ticket burden on customer
service departments while actually improving
customer satisfaction.

The complexity of education relationships
and the potential of Web hosting technology
place all kinds of facets on the relationship between
Web hosting and education. And exploring
them has been enlightening for us. If all goes
well, you’ll learn something along the way.