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Soon after covid struck, we saw that everything moved online. All businesses were forced to move online to connect with their customers and stay relevant. In the last few years we are used to getting everything online, from neighborhood grocery stores to restaurants to doc consultation everything has moved online. Hence, the changing scenes, growing competition among businesses and increasing digitalization are driving businesses to have a strong online presence. This is happening across all sectors and all businesses big and small. It has now become impossible to run a business without a web presence.
This is where the internet industry or the web hosting industry plays a key role. The Internet has been doing a fantastic job so far in providing for the increasing and changing needs of technology. The growth of the internet industry has been highly facilitated by the hosting industry.
What is Web Hosting?
Hosting is the process of buying or renting a space to launch your application on the world wide web. Hosting is provided by a hosting service provider, who gives you the computing infrastructure, where your application source code is deployed. Every application or website on the internet has to be hosted on a server or cloud instance. So when you host your application on the internet, it is similar to building a house on your land. The application is the house you built and the web hosting is the land on which the house is built. Then every website will have a unique domain name that is like the address which takes the user to the location where your application is hosted when the domain name is accessed through a web browser. So hosting keeps the internet alive.
Hosting not just includes website hosting; it involves a lot of other hosting services like application/software hosting, data/storage hosting and IT services hosting. The major types of hosting evolved due to the advancement of technology, user requirements, security, scalability and performance needs are; Shared hosting, Dedicated hosting, VPS hosting and Cloud hosting. The rapid growth of cloud technologies has been a key factor in boosting the hosting market. It is expected to maintain its dominance in the upcoming years. More organizations are moving to cloud hosting owing to its high performance, scalability, security, reliability, business continuity(DR) and pricing models; that provide pay-as-you-go or subscription models, which are highly popular in today’s world.
Market size of the Hosting Industry
The web hosting industry’s beginning was quite modest. It all started in 1969 with only 4 hosts. Over the next 5 decades, the industry went through a quantum leap to a staggering 126 million hosts, 30 million domains, and 28.2 million websites. In 2021, there were over 1.21 billion hostnames registered online.
The global hosting services market size was USD 83.99 billion in 2021. The global hosting services market is projected to grow from USD 83.99 billion in 2021 to USD 267.10 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 18.0%
Source: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/
Market Segment of the Hosting Industry
Based on the type of hosting, the market is segmented into shared hosting, dedicated hosting, collocated hosting, virtual private server and reseller hosting.
The shared hosting dominated the market with maximum market share. This is expected to grow even more due to the adoption of shared hosting by small and medium organizations as well as individuals. The SMB’s are present in large numbers across every region and sector. Hence, the shared hosting is expected to be in high demand.
As these small businesses start to grow, they look for more reliable, secure hosting that provides more administrative control and also future upgrading options. Thus they opt for dedicated, virtual private server or cloud hosting. Hence, the dedicated hosting is also forecasted to gain rapid growth as it offers complete admin control in customizing the server and capable of future upgrading requirements. Similarly, the co-located hosting and VPS hosting segments are expected to be in high demand due to their value proposition.
Based on deployment mode, the public cloud segment exhibited the highest growth in the web hosting services market. It is expected to maintain its dominance in the future too. More organizations are moving to cloud hosting due to high performance, scalability, security, reliability, business continuity(DR) and flexible pricing models. The hybrid model is also expected to attain high traction owing to its high level of security and uptime over public and private clouds.
Source: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/
Key Industry Players
The web hosting industry is a huge market with lots of players. From a small start, it has evolved into a billion-dollar industry that will only grow bigger in size, especially in the shared and cloud hosting segment. Though the industry is dominated by a few big players, (GoDaddy, AWS, Google Cloud etc.); there is also a strong segment of small and medium players that form the backbone of the industry. While most of the hosting businesses concentrate in the USA, other countries are also not far behind.
Source: https://www.datanyze.com/
Conclusion
The web hosting industry has had exponential growth in the last few years. This trend shows no indications of slowing down. With such an enormous demand for web real estate and the rapid growth of technology, the hosting industry will witness growth at an even faster rate. All of this indicates that the growth of the hosting industry will surpass all the forecasted figures.
