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December 30, 2004

Web Hosting - more storage demands at lower costs

It seems like "everyone" is needing web hosting space. Businesses are of course using more and more web space but also individuals.

According to CTO Michael Brunson, who oversees web host Zipa.com's hosting operation "The advent of Blogging and flawlessly-easy-home-web publishing has sent a surge of new demand through the hosting industry." (Zipa team - left) This surge in the need for web hosting is causing Zipa and other web hosts to up their web hosting offerings.

"The old quotas of 10 or 20 megs of disk space were nice," Brunson said. "But that isn't cutting it anymore. The definition of 'Webmaster' is changing to become much more inclusive. Average Internet users are demanding web space for everything from posting family photo albums to backing up their computers. We're talking about gigabytes of space now, not megabytes."

While the cost of disk space has decreased over the years, it's not been as dramatic as the increase in demand for online storage space.

"Looking ahead, we found ourselves forced to deal with this reality sooner than later. It'd be nice to stay in the comfort of zone of 20 meg shared hosting accounts, but we've decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and introduce gigabyte hosting plans that start at $10 a month for two gigs; $50, for 10 gigs."

A gigabyte, of course, is 1,000 times the size of a megabyte.

"It's a lot of space from the traditional mindset of the hosting community, but it's about on target for what the average Internet user is going to start expecting," Brunson said. " It's like getting a dedicated server for the cost and ease of shared hosting."

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