5 major trends in hosting in 2015

In 1899, Charles Dewell, a member of the US Patent Office, made the statement that "everything that could be invented has already been invented." Numerous discoveries and innovations of those days were so impressive that many people thought: there can be no more. A century later, the development of technology continues to make major changes in our lives, and there are still no visible restrictions for this.

On the other hand, according to the statement “if you make an improved mousetrap, people will buy it”, modern technologies are being developed in accordance with the demands of society, and not vice versa. The inventors of our days do not have to wait for feedback from users to understand that their ideas will bring money. For this reason, trends in technology are now displaying marketing requests much more consistently than ever. Therefore, it is very important to follow the “hottest” trends, make sure that the offer always remains “on stream”, to indulge the market demands, and constantly find the most promising opportunities for the future. We will review the most significant trends of the past, 2014, and try to apply them in 2015.
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Also, we describe how HostTracker can help to follow these trends.

Turning hosting into a batch service

In the past decades, users have chosen a hosting provider for various reasons. At first there were only a few large companies from which to choose. Further, the number of companies began to grow rapidly when medium and small businesses realized that they could enter this business with only a few servers. Competition helped to reduce prices, but only some hosting companies of those times cared about the amenities and guarantees for customers. It became a problem to find a company that could guarantee even the most basic indicator for online services - uptime - at an acceptable level.

This led to the formation of a niche in the market, which over time has been occupied by companies that have been able to offer, both business and individuals, a high-quality product with good support at an adequate cost. With the development of the service package has expanded, reports on sites, file servers, designer tools and much more, and the choice of high-quality service providers in the market has increased. Now a potential client faces a choice of several hundred hosting sites that meet their needs.

Uptime evaluation is a basic HostTrecker feature. The original purpose of the service was to help in finding acceptable hosting sites, with which our service successfully copes to this day.

Performance rating of hosting companies

In response to the growing number of hosting companies and the need to make a motivated choice for customers, hosting review sites have appeared. At the core of the business model of these sites is targeted advertising, and the activity is to compile ratings of hosting providers and provide links to register on the selected hosting. Some sites narrow the score to a few basic parameters that they consider, while others take into account dozens of factors. In 2014, the most notable trend on review sites was a special focus on performance, compared with the responsiveness of support, ease of use and the availability of additional tools. Experts suggest that in 2015, this trend will encourage providers to pay attention to their performance indicators in order to improve their reputation in reviews and, thus, to cover a larger market share of new and transferred customers.

Checking the availability of 24x7 sites, including during scheduled backups and other technical work, allows you to determine how these works affect the state of the site. In addition to availability, you can also check the speed, response time, study the correlation of site errors with the load on the database, do checks using different methods to find interesting dependencies - HostTrecker's functionality allows you to solve many problems in order to evaluate hosting from this point of view.

Branding with URLs

The vast majority of Internet users today think that the site starts with “www”, and most sites end with “.com”. These sequences of characters even appeared as separate keys on many modern devices. Since the letter combination www is common to almost all addresses, it is not possible to brand it. Similarly, the ending of .com (hereinafter, we will use the term TLD, from the English. Top-level domain - the highest level domain) pushed competitors, including .net, .biz, and others to the background. As soon as a company acquires a domain.com address, domain.net-type domains, at best, the fate of pseudonyms awaits, and individual sites with such names are unconsciously accepted as secondary by many users. At this stage, TLDs, in general, are only useful for specific sites, for example, .org for non-profit organizations or .edu for educational ones.

However, lately the value of the TLD is reborn. This rise began with the use of TLDs that point to a specific country, for example .uk implies the attitude of the site to Great Britain, (English uk - United Kingdom), or .es - to Spain (es. Es - España). Recently, the so-called generic (generic) gTLDs are being distributed. Geography bindings have become even more accurate, TLDs like .vegas or .NYC (New York City) are gaining in popularity. This allows sites of goods and services to position themselves as local to their target audience, and may provide some competitive advantages with big players. The price of such domains is much lower than the price of the promoted .com, which is another plus for small companies.

Creativity has also spawned many original and thematic TLDs. Such gTLDs as “.florist” or “.shoes” indicate that sites are engaged in floristics and footwear, respectively, and the site address already attracts the attention of customers and uniquely identifies the subject matter of the site. As the competition for the consumer grows, using gTLDs to stand out and gain a certain advantage can be very useful. Hosting providers can work with clients in the provision of “meaningful” gTLDs.

Sites in the growth of the mobile segment

While personal computers ruled the ball, websites competed in content. Now, if the site does not have a version compatible with mobile devices, it can simply be rejected in favor of a competitor with a more responsive design. This is easily seen by trying to view any non-commercial site from a mobile phone or tablet. Often such a site forces the user to flip it not only from top to bottom, but also from left to right, or reduce the scale of the site, until the moment when it becomes completely unreadable. Modern commercial sites take into account the size of the user's display, and give him content in an acceptable form for him, which makes the site understandable and attractive regardless of the device.

Statistics for 2014 shows that sites with similar responsiveness of design, had a 60% higher conversion than those who did not take into account this trend. It is assumed that in 2015 it will only grow. Hosting sites offering convenient tools for creating, configuring, and maintaining such a design will be able to earn additional revenue.

Increasing attention to safety

Unfortunately, the ability to create malware keeps pace with the development of new technologies. The success of the e-commerce system largely depends on the ability to earn the trust of customers. Even in 2014, many potential customers of online resources are scared off by regular hacks and leaks even from market leaders, as well as the inability of security systems to protect themselves from theft or at least to guarantee the identification of intruders. In 2015, hosting providers can help secure a business to their customers by offering such things as SSL certificates or malware testing. Also, they can guarantee the back-up of important customer data, the timely update of the software used and the maintenance of protective security measures, such as firewall, up to date.

HostTracker pays special attention to security. First, regular checks help to notice ddos ​​attack or http flood in time. Secondly, tools like Content Verification and some others allow you to check the status of the site, up to and including the appearance of alien files on the hosting. And third, we monitor security trends and develop tools for testing them. So, now it is possible to check your server and browser for the presence of SSL3 (also known as POODLE) . When this was relevant, there was the possibility of checking on Shellshock .