(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Last week I mentioned that we had seen a swell in “new data center” style announcements, many of them explicitly describing their decision to build in spite of the tough economic conditions, particularly in the US. This week saw more building, albeit with less overt discussion of the economic context.
Also like last week, all of those reports arrived in a cluster – in this case, on Tuesday (though that’s partly attributable to the fact that some stories were held over from the holiday on Monday).
Managed hosting provider SingleHop announced late the previous Friday that it had completed the build-out of its new offices. Intended to accommodate the company’s growth, which SingleHop measured at 673 percent over the course of 2008. Its new offices are five times as large as its previous location, and are located on the third and fourth floors of a building in downtown Chicago, close to the company’s network operations center.
On Monday, UK hosting provider Webfusion said it had collaborated with IBM to build a £2.5 million data center in Leeds, UK. The comparatively small facility will cover 1,083 square feet, with room for 130 server racks. According to Webfusion, the facility was designed with energy efficiency and hardware performance in mind.
And on Tuesda, hosting and IT service provider iB3 Networks reported that it had signed an agreement to operate a 10,000 square foot, Tier 4 data center in Columbus Ohio. The facility will be operated by iB3 and its subsidiary iBeam Solutions. The companies will take on current customers of the facility as part of the agreement, a group that generates more than $30,000 in recurring monthly revenues. The company’s announcement didn’t disclose the seller.
Along with the several new facility announcements, one of the big trends in this week’s news was the issuing of new research data, in some cases directly related to the demand for data center space more abstractly illustrated in the building announcements.
On Wednesday, data center real estate firm Digital Realty Trust reported that the results of a study it had commissioned from Campos Research & Analysis, which showed more than four out of five companies in Europe planning data center expansions within the next two years. More than a quarter of the companies surveyed were planning expansion projects commencing in 2009.
In a somewhat related study of European feelings related to data centers, The Turret Group, organizers of the Data Centre World conference, reported this week that its own recent studies show a dip in the focus on “going green” as a key motivator in pursuing energy saving solutions among data center managers. The harsh economic conditions affecting business worldwide, it seems, have made “saving money” a much more important area of focus.
In another announcement on stats, though one only peripherally related to Europe or data centers, European-based web hosting company 1&1 Internet announced on Thursday that it had surpassed Yahoo to become the fourth-largest US host, according to the statistics of hosting researcher Webhosting.Info. 1&1 first launched its services in the US approximately five years ago, and has grown quickly to occupy a major stake in that market.
While the new data center announcements were interesting in and of themselves, they were also notable for being a continuation of the major trend from the previous week. It will be worth watching to see if the pace continues in the next several weeks.
