The web hosting industry has evolved much in the past five years. Flexible, on-demand hosting plans are now being offered by both established and new web hosting providers; some new buzz words were born – cloud hosting, virtual data center, and many more.
While business people are trying to grasp the new concepts, the web hosting market keeps evolving rapidly toward cloud infrastructure as a service (cloud IaaS.) Will conventional web hosting becoming obsolete soon?
Cloud IaaS is the future of outsourced hosting, as stated by Gartner in its recent research report. Gartner also forecasts that cloud IaaS will rake in 25 percent of overall hosting market share by the end of 2011 (excluding colocation and mass-market hosting.)
Before we continue, if you are wondering what IaaS is, check out our blog post about the basics of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
Cloud IaaS is an emerging market, and companies involving in cloud IaaS are characterized as those that embrace changes very well. Gartner explains that each and every web hosting company must evolve to be competitive, because new companies entering the market are cloud-savvy: They offer on-demand and/or pay-as-you-go plans to clients, which is attractive in efficiency and effectiveness standpoint because you only pay what you use.
Gartner also indicates that in the (near) future, cloud IaaS vendors will adopt a hybrid strategy, combining virtualized resources (via the cloud to offer scalable services) with dedicated servers (for regular resource-intensive usages, such as databases.)
Now, the big question: Which cloud IaaS vendors to consider?
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant maps the who’s who in cloud IaaS. There are plenty of others not included in the Quadrant, as they are not meeting some of the criteria.
Here are the chosen vendors:
What’s next?
Are you looking for a cloud hosting service? One word of advice for you: Be cautious.
Gartner warns that the immature and rapidly evolving market can jeopardize your business plan. It would be difficult to know which vendors will be around for quite a long time.
