Web Hosting Companies?!

dahooligan

Hi, I posted this in the Biz, marketing section and I want to post it in here because its for a Marketing Project with regard to web hosting services for college that I'm asking. I'm looking at web hosting companies and wondering what competition exists in the market. I'm basically asking for a list of people interested in web hosting, and web solutions. Also, ask what poublications they read, who they host with and why.
Any help is appreciated - I'll pay money for the best answers!;)

rymus

I host a couple of sites with Blacknight; I've found them to be the best to deal with of the Irish companies...

I also host alot of stuff with digital crocus. Cheap but dogged with problems lately. Lots of downtime related to a server move.

Not sure if thats any use to you, if you want to send me money you can though

dahooligan

but as for which Irish hosting or solutions(?) company is best or recommended? And what publications are halfway decent reading material on the topic?

Rollo Tamasi

You should post over here. Its where all the webmasters hang out. A few of them work for hosting companies as well....happy hunting

axer

I think jmcc knows alot about this type of thing.

Stephen

another thumbs up for Blacknight here. Myself and a few friends have sites hosted with them.

Boards is hosted by hosting365.ie, who also host game servers

No other quality irish webhosts immediately come to mind. Most of the ISP's offer webhosting/colo services but charge stupid money for it.

roamer

Claranet are one of the main ones in the UK. Very good service.

stuey

letshost.ie. i was afraid of goin with them before i actaully did, cause they are not that big, but they are very very good and reliable

excellent price as well, and loads of extras

smeggle

I just found probably one of the best US solutions I've come across. They have 24/7 'Live' online support - I had any and all queries answered in minutes and I'm strongly thinking of moving..Good value as well. I'm allways dubious of 'Off Shore' solutions but this is one I'd definately recommend.

there website is here http://www.eagerhost.com/

If you want an Irish based solution then letshost.ie is the best value around at the moment from what I've researched. They offer the best value on .ie domains for instance - far outstripping there competitors. I'm probably going to be using them for this in the future....

byte

I use both Siteground.com and WebsiteSource.com

Both are US-based. Downtime has been minimal with both.

mneylon

dahooligan - have a look at:
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/tophosts/Country/IE

It's not 100% accurate, as it does not show market share of ccTLDs (.ie, .co.uk etc) but gives you something to start with.

The Irish market is probably best explained by someone like jmcc

jmcc

dahooligan wrote:

Hi, I posted this in the Biz, marketing section and I want to post it in here because its for a Marketing Project with regard to web hosting services for college that I'm asking. I'm looking at web hosting companies and wondering what competition exists in the market. I'm basically asking for a list of people interested in web hosting, and web solutions. Also, ask what poublications they read, who they host with and why.
Any help is appreciated - I'll pay money for the best answers!;)

Well I've stats here going back to 2000 covering all hosters (approximately 1.2 million) in com/net/org/biz/info/ie. The detailed stats reports, published for the industry each month, cover the Irish hosting business in depth. The Annual overview of the Irish hosting business will be published next month detailing the totals, new registrations, deletions, transfers in, transfers out and secondary domain nameservice for all Irish hosters - at a reasonable price of course.

There is a lot of competition in the Irish hosting business. Over the last few years, the Irish market has changed from being an ISP dominated one to one dominated by the Hosting Service Providers (HSPs). The ISPs now account for less than 24% of the Irish market. The market itself is really two sections - dedicated servers and colocation, and the cheaper shared hosting or retail. The bulk of the market is in the retail hosting but the big money is in the dedicated hosting services.

The bulk of the Irish market is spread among the top 22 hosters, each of host over 500 domains. The largest Irish hoster is Hosting 365. The two ISPs, Eircom and Esat are also significant hosters. Eircom is making an effort to regain some of its lost ground in retail hosting. Esat does not seem to doing much about the retail market and has been losing customers continually. Both Eircom and Esat are over represented in .ie domains. This is because the traditional .ie market used the ISPs and the "discounts" introduced by IEDR worked in favour of the large hosters such as Eircom, Esat and others. As a result, the dynamics of the .ie market are artificially skewed, so much so that real competition is subdued. The gTLD market, (com/net/org/biz/info) is far more vibrant and the numbers of CNOIB registrations each month always exceed the numbers of .ie registrations.

Competition in the low end of the gTLD market for Irish hosters has not always been fierce. But with the entry of Webhostingireland.ie into the market in April 2004, the other hosters began to take notice. Until that time, the low end of the market was largely the province of Hosting365. The growth of Webhostingireland.ie from 2004 to the present has been ballistic. It has grown to be one of the top hosters. As a result, it encouraged Novara, Blacknight and some others such as Letshost to pay attention to the budget hosting market with varying results.

I'm not sure if you want to build your report on the reasons on which people host with specific hosters or on the competition in the market. But in real terms, the competition is going to hit a few Irish hosters hard in the next few months as the market consolidates.

One HSP that has made the transition to being an ISP has almost completely neglected its hosting business and has been almost flat-line for the past year. One of the more recent advertising campaigns of a certain hoster has been less than successful in pure growth terms. There is also a split beginning to become apparent between web developers who offer hosting and pure play Hosting Service Providers.

The November market breakdown is below and shows how the market is spread across hosters..

Hoster Tiers : Market Shares As Of 01 November 2005 - Identified Domains = 107184


Hosters Domains Market Share - Market Segments
Tier 1 22 24955 23.28% Traditional Early Market Hosters (ISPs)
Tier 2 24 57768 53.90% Hosting Service Providers > 500 domains
Tier 3 65 13925 12.99% HSPs 101 - 500 domains
Tier 4 324 9814 9.16% HSPs/Web Developers 7 - 100 domains
Tier 5 392 843 0.98% Individuals/Firms/Web Developers < 7 domains
Tier 6 44 1056 0.99% Educational And Government And Registry



The webhosting.info stats are nice if you want colourful graphs and a rough view of the top of the Irish market. However I do not consider webhosting.info stats to be accurate as there are some fundamental mathematical problems with tracking domain registrations that they, webhosting.info, have not solved properly. Another major source of inaccuracy seems to be the ease with which a hoster can add the nameservers of its resellers to provide a somewhat inflated view of its own importance. And of course as Blacknight pointed out, they do not include .ie cctld - something that WhoisIreland.com does.

Regards...jmcc

Voodoo2

Try www.godaddy.com Ive used them 5-6 times with out any hassel