Computerscope Covers Irish Hosting Business
The latest Computerscope magazine had an article, written by John Collins, on the Irish hosting scene. The article was interesting because it had a quote from the CIO of BT Ireland, Martin Wickham, about the Irish hosting market being a “fragmented and dysfunctional market with a lot of offerings around pure space rental.” This quote seems to demonstrate the lack of situational awareness common in ISP management.
The Irish hosting market is far from a dysfunctional market. Though without accurate data, the Irish market can seem to be fragmented and dysfunctional especially if you rely on dubious information sources such as webhosting.info etc. The real battle in the Irish hosting business is for the high value .ie clients. And it is a battle in which BT Ireland, like other ISPs continues to lose ground.
As with any market where the barrier to entry is low, the lower end of the market is always going to appear highly fragmented. But at the top of the market, it takes on a very structured form. The top Irish hosters account for over 54% of the Irish market. The ISPs are losing market share because these HSPs can provide a highly automated and very efficient service. And in a ruthlessly efficient market, only the fittest survive.
The Computerscope article showed a good understanding of the Irish hosting situation. I don’t think that the Irish web hosting service providers (HSPs) would like to be referred to as “indie hosters” especially when some of them have more clients hosted than many ISPs.
Just looking at BT Ireland’s domain counts from December 2000 to December 2005, (part of a report on the history of the Irish Hosting Business that will be published next week) it is easy to see why ISPs continue lose market share to HSPs. The HSPs are small and often very efficiently run operations where the business owner has everything on the line. The ISP management just don’t have that kind of dedication. And in a service driven industry, that can prove fatal.
Tags: IrishBlogs,IEDR, Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting,.EU
Written by John McCormac on December 17th, 2005 with 5 comments.
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