Growth In Hosting Set To Come From Hosted Applications

Traditionally the web hosting industry has been pretty straightforward. The host has always provided the space or "accommodation" for the site. With a hosted application, however, the host also gives you the website.

This development in the industry has probably been inspired by blogging. Blogging clearly showed us the power there is in a person concentrating on the content and working with a blog site that has already been set up. It is one of the reasons for the huge popularity of blogging.

With websites, the concept seems to have been inspired by the real estate industry where agents have been more than prepared to pay a premium on their web hosting fees. In return they get a web site that just needs them to enter their personal details and they are immediately open for business. In paying the premium for this hosted application, the estate agents are of course aware of the fact that had they built the site on their own from scratch, it would have easily cost them thousands of dollars. They exchange a large up-front cost for higher monthly payments.

The rapid development of personal home pages is more proof that the trend of hosted applications can easily be a gold mine for most web hosts. Myspace is the largest name online for personal homepages and has grown at an unbelievable speed.

When you really think about it, this trend is hardly surprising. This is because it has been clear for a long time that the technical complexities of keeping a site up and running have always been a great handicap to webmasters who need time to update the content and to market their sites.

A useful and potentially high profit business model for any web host would be to concentrate their efforts on a certain industry and provide complete hosted applications in return for a premium on monthly fees. It would definitely beat the current trend of constantly providing hosting clients with more space and bandwidth at the same old price.