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By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
December 26, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- While the Web hosting business has spent the past few years catching up to the excess data center space built up during the heady dot-com days, 2005 witnessed a number of high-profile data center openings and expansions among Web hosting providers, colocation providers and network hubs.
A number of notable Web hosting providers opened new data centers throughout 2005. Leading the pack is C I Host (cihost.com), which opened its Newark, New Jersey facility in July.
Located just a half-mile from Rutgers University and eight miles from Manhattan, the new center has a direct, private fiber connection to its planned London facility. The fiber connection will enable private data transfer between the two facilities.
C I Host also expanded its 38,000 square-foot Dallas-area data center to meet the ongoing demand of its growing client base.
In July, Peak 10 (peak10.com) expanded its Raleigh data center to facilitate its growth in the Research Triangle region. The center will also provide additional redundancy options for Peak 10's customers around the globe.
In May, the managed services provider also added an extra 10,000 square feet of space to its Louisville, Kentucky data center. The renovation will support the company's growth and add redundancy options for its presence in North Carolina and Florida.
In January, The Planet (theplanet.com) opened a tier-1 data center at Infomart in Dallas. The new facility has 51,000 square feet of space, including a 35,000 square-foot data center and offices.
September saw Superb Internet's dedicated Web hosting division SuperbServers.Net (superbservers.net) open its third facility in Seattle, with the capacity to host between 5,000 and 7,000 servers.
IPOWERWEB (ipowerweb.com) upgraded its downtown Los Angeles data center in June, quadrupling its floor space with 6,000 square feet of new space. The company also expanded its network topology.
Colocation providers saw several big new facilities opening in 2005. Peer 1 Network (peer1.net) opened two new data centers in Herndon, Virginia and Los Angeles, and in January, expanded on its existing centers in New York and Toronto.
The Canadian colocation provider also acquired the dedicated server assets of Interland (interland.com) for $14 million, which encompasses approximately 8,300 dedicated servers and data centers in Atlanta, Miami and Freemont, California.
In September, 365 Main (365main.com) acquired a 131,000 square-foot data center in El Segundo, California.
Digital Realty Trust (digitalrealtytrust.com) had a busy year, launching seven new data center facilities. Five of the data centers, along with an office building, are located in Denver, Colorado. The other two are in Santa Clara and El Segundo, California. The combined 642,000 square feet was acquired for $109 million.
The company also acquired two data center properties in Europe - the IBM Technology Park in Mainz, Germany and the Geneva Data Center in Geneva, Switzerland.
Switch and Data (switchanddata.com) acquired three data centers from LayerOne in January. The facilities are located in Dallas, Miami and Chicago, with network interconnection hubs in Los Angeles and New York.
The acquisition expands the company's footprint of 35 sites in 23 North American markets, bringing the company's total customer base to more than 800.
Rounding off the list are two large network hubs that opened data center facilities this year.
In September, AT&T (att.com) opened two additional data centers in San Jose, California and Shanghai, China, bringing the company's total number of data centers worldwide to 28.
The telecommunications giant also expanded the capacity of its New York facility by 27 percent.
Equinix (equinix.com) acquired four new data center facilities throughout the year, including its fourth center in Silicon Valley. The additional three centers are located in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Ashburn, Virgina.
While the expansion of facilities is a natural effect of growth in the Web hosting business, the construction and acquisition of data center space that took place in 2005 was a big change from recent years, in which Web hosts have had plenty of excess, unused data center space to tap for new growth.
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