Last year my web hosting end of the year review article focused mostly on the perspective of the web hosting company and what these companies were doing to try to lure more customers by hyper competition of packages and steep discounts for new customers. As aggressive as 2006 was in terms of trying to acquire market share, 2007 turned out to be relatively calm in the market acquisition aspect.

Part of the reason for this calm was an acknowledgement by some of the larger more aggressive companies that plans and pricing used as chips for marketing had gotten out of control. Other factors included a couple of mergers and sales of companies at the end of 2006 and some larger mergers in 2007. Fortunately for those of us who like to sit down at our computers and try to do some serious testing for different web hosting plans. It also allowed us to build even stronger relationships with our fellow web site hosting testers and to establish better more efficient testing measures.

Overall it seems like this year there were far fewer incidents of malicious strikes of DDOS or spamming the servers than there had been in recent previous years. Part of this effort was from the web hosting companies’ efforts to better weed out the cases of fraudulent customers, most of whom were not looking to use the servers for good purposes and there were some advances made in the hardware and the connectivity to the web hosting servers.

The overall rating for website hosting services in 2007 was the highest industry rating we had seen in the past 9 years with many more companies focusing on their services and support and making into the higher grade levels than they had previously. We also saw more new web hosting providers who had less stumbling than we hosting companies had seen in past years with new companies emerging onto the web hosting scene.

Thank you for all of the website hosting testers who were able to share their results with us to help us better put together a comprehensive picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the various web hosting providers out their. In 2007 we tested more web sites on more web hosting services than we had ever tested previously.

We did start to see towards the very end of 2007 that some of the web hosts who had been hyper aggressive in 2006 start to push the website hosting market again for what we hope wont be simply unusable package pressure for marketing in 2008.

We hope that your 2007 was better than 2006 and that your 2008 will be even better than any other year. Does that make sense J? Happy New Year,

Charlie White, Regional Editor  - N. America

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