Suddenly, Customers

War with Iraq looms. Americans are fretting about the economy. There are signs that more companies are leasing hosting space. Huh? Those three thoughts wouldn't appear to flow together. But I'm noticing a definite uptick in announcements of customer wins in recent weeks.

The busiest provider has been Inflow. Since Jan. 20, the Denver-based managed hosting firm has signed three new hosting clients and purchased additional business from Interliant. New customers announced by Inflow include Thompson Machinery in Nashville, Barry Wehmiller in St. Louis, and Frontier Airlines in Denver, along with the aforementioned former Interliant customers in Atlanta.

That's not all. Digex has been busy as well, with a press release today about the signing of John Crane, coming on the heels of last Wednesday's announcement of HIT Entertainment and the Jan. 13 decision by Reader's Digest to expand the services it hosts with Digex.

Meanwhile, Savvis signed a contract last week to provide managed hosting to the Discovery Channel, Verio announced a hosting deal with The Quilt, Conxion inked a hosting pact with Vision Direct, and Infocrossing touted a $4 million contract win from a customer it refused to name.

Is this a verifiable trend or another false alarm? It's hard to know. Either more customers are being signed up, or providers are making more noise about their customer wins. Both scenarios would validate the reported gains in service provider confidence in recent months.