Liam Eagle: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Read the Digital Edition – This edition of our Hottest Hosts buyer’s guide and directory issue is the fifth instance of the annual publication, a milestone that kind of snuck up on me, personally, but which I think provides an intriguing validation of the format, and of the principle behind it.

Read the Digital Edition

The hosted services industry is a fascinating business (incidentally, that statement could be the sort of in-a-nutshell argument for the entirety of our work here at the WHIR). In particular, I’m referring to the tiered and hierarchical ecosystem of businesses that turn the bare-bones things like real estate, power, hardware and software into business and consumer services for the end user.

That single relationship between an end user small business and its hosting provider, followed upstream, can reflect dozens of key supplier relationships. Outsourcing complexity is what service providers are selling, and, for the most part, they understand where that’s going to figure into their own businesses.

When you get all the way back to those basic ingredients I mentioned, there isn’t a hosting company out there that can do it all (nobody, as far as I know, is generating all their own power, for instance). But there are only a few hosting companies that do all their software development in-house. Even among the biggest hosting operations, development of tools in-house is the exception to the rule. The vast majority of hosting providers are resellers, usually of a long list of services.

For a hosting provider, that means that building a better hosting service is a matter of picking the right partners – assembling a set of solutions that can really meet the complete needs of your customers. Finding and connecting with the right partners can be nearly as critical to the success of a hosting business as the way it delivers those services, once assembled.

From a customer’s perspective, when you’re considering buying hosted IT services, you’re picking a partner you’re going to rely on to meet the needs of your business. And if that partnership is successful, it will probably only deepen over time.

Plenty of prospective hosting customers already have a complex set of hosting needs, and they’re most likely to rely on their hosting provider as both a supplier of critical services and as an advisor right from the start. But even those customers looking for a simple web hosting service will find new opportunities for outsourcing IT needs by looking to their provider.

Think of this book as a guide to making those connections, for customers new to hosted IT services and looking for a trusted partner, for those looking for new services to wrap around their existing hosting services, and (via the Web Host Essentials section on the other side of this magazine) for those hosting providers looking to add to their current stable of partners, and thereby their set of offerings.

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