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By Rich Miller
Carrier Hotels Editor
Posted Jan 29, 2004
The best-known collapses are close to being mopped up. The sale of Cable & Wireless' hosting operation to SAVVIS is scheduled to close by Feb. 13. WorldCom is scheduled to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy before the end of February. That should help temper the "headline risk" that has made end-users wary about the stability of data center service providers.
That doesn't mean everything is peachy. The lower end of the hosting business is being seriously commoditized, with multiple providers offering shared hosting at $5 a month, dedicated servers at $49 a month and domains for $5 a year. That kind of pricing has a habit of working its way up the value chain. While consolidation continues, new players are still entering the market. One of them is Europe's largest hosting company, Germany's 1&1 Internet, which just ended a three-month promotion in which it gave away 200,000 full-featured hosting accounts. How do you compete with that?
Yes, challenges remain. You know the old cliche about the light at the end of the tunnel? For several years now, the default position in our industry was to assume that it was a train. I understand that reflex. But many of our industry's survival stories are now seguing into success stories. Remember that sometimes the light is really the end of the tunnel.
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http://www.carrierhotels.com -- Phone: (609) 243-7525
http://www.carrierhotels.com/news/2004/Jan/29/the_end_of_the_tunnel_print.html
The End of the Tunnel
By Rich Miller
Carrier Hotels Editor
Posted Jan 29, 2004
For the past couple of years, it was easy for our DealWire feature to keep up with press releases about customer wins and growth. There weren't very many. This week offered a fresh example of how that's changed. Equinix announced hosting/colo deals with two major users, Clearing Corporation and Akamai. The Planet announced sales of 1,500 dedicated servers in December, a new one-month record. LayerOne said that Cable & Wireless has placed POPs in its data centers, while Texas.net said it signed two new disaster recovery clients and Peak 10 touted its customer retention performance.
The best-known collapses are close to being mopped up. The sale of Cable & Wireless' hosting operation to SAVVIS is scheduled to close by Feb. 13. WorldCom is scheduled to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy before the end of February. That should help temper the "headline risk" that has made end-users wary about the stability of data center service providers. That doesn't mean everything is peachy. The lower end of the hosting business is being seriously commoditized, with multiple providers offering shared hosting at $5 a month, dedicated servers at $49 a month and domains for $5 a year. That kind of pricing has a habit of working its way up the value chain. While consolidation continues, new players are still entering the market. One of them is Europe's largest hosting company, Germany's 1&1 Internet, which just ended a three-month promotion in which it gave away 200,000 full-featured hosting accounts. How do you compete with that?
Yes, challenges remain. You know the old cliche about the light at the end of the tunnel? For several years now, the default position in our industry was to assume that it was a train. I understand that reflex. But many of our industry's survival stories are now seguing into success stories. Remember that sometimes the light is really the end of the tunnel.
http://www.carrierhotels.com -- Phone: (609) 243-7525