Jul 10
17
Web Hosting Industry
It has been almost 10 years, a few months to go since I was really acquainted with the web-hosting industry. I had a passion for remote connectivity and that was really what led me into getting a VPS account in a Singapore based firm. The company had a good record and the customer support people were also very nice. They would walk you through even simple scripts that were almost alien to me in those days. All of a sudden after a year and a half of happily learning from them and getting acquainted with the Linux box the company vanished in open space. No one I knew could be contacted. Phones were no longer working. The loss was a bit too much for me too handle as I had just stepped into starting a hosting business for myself. cPanel had been my choice and still is til today after all the control panel were given a try. I still hope cPanel comes out with a stable and reliable release for windows.
This was the time when Godaddy had just started as well. Soon I shifted to godaddy with a few of my registered domains but did not fall into its hosting.
They were expensive and least supportive. Hunting all over for getting a good data center was still a task in those days. Google was not of much help either and all that I could find was labeled “Buyers beware”. I tried places in Texas, Florida and what not places.
There are those people who bend backwards to support you with your stupid questions, and there are those who don’t care if you are a customer. The better ones are obvious. The web hosting industry has changed since then and there has been a race and war over prices with lots of people preferring mouth watering offers like those from godaddy but end up crying if their website really does mean anything to them in financial terms.
Losing track of a high tech industry is very easy even if you step down for a few days where as I managed to leave it aside for a year or two and lost track of everything. I opted for shared hosting myself and now its time to bounce back. It has taken a considerable amount of time to get on track with all the buzz and pricing but certainly its much more easier today to re-bounce with easy access to merchant services, credit card processing and systems that automate billings and payments. Will need time to configure everything, revamp the website and start off again. Not from scratch but at least a new.
Good customer response and support tracking system is the key to all success and I hope getting a good system running as soon as possible.
The hosting industry is still promising and is still far from being saturated as the world reaches a land mark of 200 million registrations and there is always a possibility of every human on Earth having his own domain just like a surname. Why not, there are lots of possibilities. Believe it or not, the internet is still the best marketing tool easily available and a domain name the most competitive brand name. The .com boom maybe over but the available space it infinite.
