With every passing year, every industry undergoes several major upgrades and need to match up with the trends that have a direct impact on the user experience. The web hosting industry is an industry that has grown very significantly after the inventions of the World Wide Web or WWW and the Internet. In order to match up with the ever-changing demands, the best web hosting providers face fierce competition within the industry. This competition is intended to serve the basic purpose of providing the best user experiences. All the leading players emphasize providing product innovation and setting the other players in the industry to follow them.
It is needless to say that one has to analyze a number of factors before going for a reputable web hosting services. Security is one of the top-most important criteria when one selects a hosting provider. Also, the web hosting provider needs to provide maximum uptime as the cost of a single-second downtime is very high and most of the SMBs (small and mid-sized businesses) can’t cope up with the downtime costs.
As stated earlier, the growth of the web hosting industry is quite significant and besides the above-stated factors (Internet and WWW), e-commerce trade is also one of the key growth drivers of the industry. This market segment needs smoother website operations, maintenance, as well as data security and these are some factors that web hosting providers need to focus on when developing products.
The growth of the web hosting market is surrounded by threats like the drift in user attitude towards hosting. For small businesses, there exists a huge gap between DIY (do-it-yourself) and professional websites.
So following are some web hosting trends that are going to dominate the industry in the coming time-
Green Web Hosting
Green web hosting is an Internet hosting service that involves the usage of green technologies for reducing the impacts on the environment. Most of the green web hosting companies will have carbon offsetting that will help in powering their data centers using renewable energy sources. These companies will also be carrying out activities like energy conservation and deploying the uses of energy-efficient appliances.
Green hosting would be encapsulating green marketing that would directly focus on ‘green consumers’ and the concern they’ll have towards the environment. However, in the past, the adoption of green hosting was a bit slow in the initial phase, and most of the hosting providers adopted green hosting at premium costs. With time, the awareness between the users grew and in the near future, the hosting companies will be offering these services at no extra added costs.
REC or renewable energy certificates are the certificating authority that makes sure that the hosting is using renewable energy. Companies having expertise in making renewable sources of energy generate the RECs and sell these to a web hosting company.
Cloud Hosting
For some years now, cloud hosting has been a key growth driver. Cloud hosting is an affordable option as it can remove the shortcomings that a physical server has. Similar to cloud management, cloud hosting gives an efficient platform where the user can store his data. In the case of cloud hosting, the resources of the user’s website can be pulled from different virtual servers. Cloud hosting is a scalable as well as a reliable hosting option that can have a great impact on the web hosting industry in the coming time. Cloud hosting is a form of hosting where a cluster of servers can work simultaneously. Its servers provide resources at all times and work on a pay-per-use model, allowing the website owners to only pay for the resources and space that they require.
HTTPS as The New Web Security Norm
Nearly 18 months back, Google Chrome started pinpointing the websites without an HTTPS as “not secure”. It was not so easy as there are a large number of websites that are present over the World Wide Web. So, to motivate these websites and their respective owners, Google Chrome promised a fair amount of enhancement in their rankings. This promise made by Chrome laid the foundation for establishing HTTPS as the new standard norm in the web hosting domain. When a website refuses to shift to an HTTPS URL, it suffers its ranking and become an expensive affair for the businesses present online over the web. By the end of this year, it is expected that all the website owners will start using HTTPS as the new norm.
Deployment of Security Protocols
Web hosting providers are going to emphasize more on the amplified security protocols leading the hosting providers to reinforce more tightened security measures for avoiding all types of data violations along with cybersecurity. Web hosting providers will also encash to the fullest by deploying hosting security protocols such as compliance checks for CMS, SSL certification, and data storage in an encrypted format.
As per an online report, nearly 2 billion records containing personal data were breached in a period of 15 months ranging from January 2017 to March 2018. As a result, web hosting providers are now strongly emphasizing security protocols. Offering user privacy protection has now become inevitably crucial for hosting providers.
Domain privacy is one of the best features that a web hosting company provides to its end users and refers to an add-on service that these companies offer. Whenever a customer registers his domain name, his personal details are fetched in the WHOIS database. Domain privacy protection helps in securing all the personal data of the customers and remain confidential from others.
From the above graph, it is clearly evident that SSL certifications are going to register the maximum CAGR growth by 2020. It reflects that web hosting providers are going to emphasize heavily security protocols like SSL.
Rise of DIY Websites
The most significant and direct competition that the web hosting industry faces is from the drag-and-drop website builders. These provide a much easier and wider range of customization features. Both DIY(Do-It-Yourself) website builders, as well as web-hosting providers, allow individuals and businesses to establish their online presence. Web hosting companies offer resources like- bandwidth, storage, server, and network.
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DIY web builders allow users to mark their websites based upon visuals only with no extensive or technical coding.
Concluding Notes
With the advancement in technology, various opportunities and the above-listed trends are going to disrupt the web hosting domain. These trends must be deployed by the hosting providers as there are a number of internal and external factors that are constantly changing. The above-stated trends, when used effectively, will definitely help the users to gain a competitive business edge.