[thelist] bigger hosting - a trend? (fwd)

[Seb]

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Sometime around 18:23 08/01/2002, Daniel J. Cody did verily sayeth on 
behalf of Cleo:

>I've noticed lately something that resembles a trend. While the big dot-coms
>have gone crashing, it would seem that smaller sites are getting bigger and
>bigger.

>On the lists that I frequent (including this one), I see urgent requests for
>hosting, because sites are getting kicked off from their regular hosts.
>Reasons for those evictions range from " too high bandwidth" , to " load too
>high for the servers ".

>In fact, I had one site offline for a little over a month till we could find
>a host that would take us for a price that we were able to pay. It seems "
>small sites"  as in sites done by individuals, not companies, are getting
>more and more exposure.
>
>Has anyone else noticed this trend ? Or is it just the specific circles that
>I frequent?
>
>What can those sites do? The ad market has crashed, there's no money coming
>in. the dotcoms are gone, yet the demand is still there.

Hi Cleo,

In the course of writing, I somehow turned a single paragraph reply into a 
bit of an essay. :) Here goes:

Generally, more and more people are getting onto the internet. Whilst it 
might seem that from a business perspective, 96-98 were the glory years of 
the web, in actual fact the number of people online is going up at an 
astonishing rate. Here in the UK, some 20% of the population is now online, 
compared to about 10% in 99. The great thing is, these figures represent 
only the tip of the iceberg. Estimated growth in the next three years looks 
towards 50% of the population being online.

I develop and manage the web properties of the UK arm of a fairly huge 
company. Over the past 2 years, we've seen traffic more than triple. Part 
of this is due to increasingly customer-focused investment by the client. 
However,  a great chunk of the popularity increase is due to the simple 
fact of increasing numbers of people going online.

Now, I can't speak for most people, but in the few cases that I know 
directly of, this is more to do with an assumption of increasing bandwidth 
and connection availability on the behalf of users. People are putting more 
*quality* media online. Think how easy it is to put digital photos online 
from a $50 camera compared to 2 years ago. Think the same for home movies, 
audio.

Now I refer you again to my first point about the number of people going 
online. With the ever-decreasing costs of internet connections (believe it 
or not, I was only able to migrate away from per-second call charges and a 
modem to aDSL two months ago), this huge number of people are looking for 
more engaging content to consume in their time online, and they find it not 
in the bland, broadcast-centric messages of large corporations and dotcoms, 
but in the personal, emotive writings that you get from weblogs and 
personal sites.

The phenomenon of actively pursuing an interest in the lives of complete 
strangers is best manifest in the popularity of TV shows such as Big 
Brother (of which almost every country in the world now has a franchise). 
Weblogs are the natural, online extension of this phenomenon, allowing you 
to go one step further and actually engage interactively with the subject 
of your attention.

Advertising is a declining industry, not just on the internet where 
alternative content is almost always available without the ads, but even in 
broadcast media, where technology such as PVRs (TiVo and its brethren) are 
allowing effortless timeshifting without the adverts. There's an entirely 
different discussion about where the future of internet advertising lies, 
but I really don't want to give those vultures any good ideas. ;)

Just as a point of interest, I've been following the hosting thread 
closely, and based upon Garrett's advice, am now in the process of signing 
up with DSVR for a new site I'm in the process of developing, something 
personal that will have fairly excessive hosting requirements.

Seb.





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