If you’ve already made that most significant step and bravely stepped into entrepreneurial waters, opened your own business and became your own boss, something you need to think about further is definitely creating your own website!
Okay, you can also think about being profitable, but if there’s something that really helps you do so, then it’s a good web presentation for you or your business.
Creating a website is no longer nice to have, as it’s an absolute must have now. More than 95% of all purchases we make today start on the Internet in some way. We are talking about a huge number of users who use the Internet as their primary source of information.
Having a constantly available website means being in front of the user every day of the year, 24 hours a day, midday and midnight (something like Avalon’s customer support), and if you want to crash faster than Croatian shipbuilding then you do not have to know anything about this.
One of the prerequisites for an excellent visitor experience of your website is the quality hosting on which it will be located. Having a website without good hosting is like driving a car with your eyes closed. In this virtual space, there are many opportunities, but there are even more threats that are getting more dangerous.
If you fail to keep your website functional and useful, you can hardly expect significant results. As technology advances every day (and hosting is technology-packed), we as a hosting provider simply have to keep up to date with trends and track the technological development of all the components that are important in this industry.
It is estimated that the value of the global web hosting market by 2020 will amount to $ 143.8 billion, while website maintenance will become cheaper.
These are the most important web hosting trends for this year!
1. Cloud
Cloud hosting has already become standard. As having a website is a standard, it being cloud-based will soon be the norm as well, because the cloud is reliable, the server availability is virtually constant, and it is already accessible to small users and offers high uptime.
Unlike traditional managed and unmanaged hosting, which uses certain resources such as RAM memory, disk space, and fixed bandwidth, the cloud is much more flexible. These are virtual resources that are available 24/7 and work on a pay-as-you-use model, which means that the user only pays for as much space as they need.
We at Avalon gladly remember the time when we started working, when Yahoo was unequaled on the web, and when Google just emerged from the shadows like some sort of a small new search engine, and it was not clear to anyone what it would actually serve.
When we started, we did not have Facebook, Youtube, smartphones (Nokia 3310, anyone?), as well as many other things without which we can not imagine life and business today. After 17 years of web hosting, in 2014, the cloud transition was a huge milestone for us, where we literally started from a new beginning, in a brand new, better way, with new technologies and challenges.
The Cloud that Avalon hosting offers today is the best combination of 20+ years experience and latest achievements in IT applied to hosting.
As we have already mentioned, technology is not a naive thing. You go on a vacation, you come back, and it’s already difficult to pick up new trends and news. Something new and better that you need to overcome and apply has already appeared.
Since 2014, all our websites and applications have been stored on the most trusted servers, which are modernized from the ground up. Then we’ve fully upgraded the hardware and software we use and moved to a new computer infrastructure, called the cloud.
2. Complete solutions and services
More and more, users are always looking for complete solutions, so they will buy more from those who offer “something else” and not just one particular service.
If you have just decided that you need a website, it is a logical choice to find someone who can provide you with website hosting, design, development, website and server maintenance, search engine optimization (SEO), email, marketing etc. .
The term “hosting” is now less and less sought after and popular. Judging by Google Trends, the frequency of Google searches for “web hosting” has dropped by 60% in the last decade.
Everyone would rather google “How to make a website and email” than “How to buy a hosting package“. Providers of hosting services will have to adapt to meet customer needs and queries.
Consequently, we at Avalon have been creating client websites for the past 10+ years and we created over 100 new websites in this year alone. Our clients continually point out trust in site design and maintenance, as we offer a unified domain registration service, hosting, website creation and maintenance, meaning full service.
3. Hosting decentralization
Web hosting will, as a service, move from a traditional into a decentralized model, according to the opinion of some of the leading people in the industry. This actually means that users will increasingly use their own servers, which will increase the speed of information exchange and change the architecture around which the software is created. Today we already have cloud and global CDNs for hosting information, but in the future we should expect that infrastructure to become decentralized.
By applying the IOT (Internet of Things) concept and knowing that all the devices we use in the future will be connected, it is clear to us that the cloud will continue to play a major role in everything.
More than ever, we will be able to access any device at any time. Part of the data will be stored on these devices instead of all being hosted in the hosting data centers, and this will specifically refer to the applications that will increasingly become client-based, while standard services that are generally accepted such as mail and ftp still remain in data centers.
But we still have some limitations. For example, the website frontend is difficult to completely switch from server to client. A similar distribution principle is used by Torrent, and the question arises as to why we still use Dropbox, Google Drive, and similar data storage services when we can accommodate huge amounts of data on thousands of computers using Torrent.
Companies that today have their own data centers for their business will be able to use the cloud service of a provider that specializes only in that in the future, and the company, as a user, will have cloud based business on their devices (mobile and desktop). Avalon’s cloud disk system is already largely decentralized because it is distributed over multiple servers, unlike the standard RAID mirror.
Specifically, user data is stored in three copies on three different servers. If a disk or server fails, the data is stored on two more disks / servers. And the usual RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive (Independent) Disks) mirror is mostly host-based, so — if the host falls, everything that’s on it falls.
Sounds familiar? In this situation we must either repair the host or migrate disks to another host. For example, a couple of years ago, we had a situation where the controller was broken on one of our servers (it happened), the host fell, but — everything was still working, which would not be possible if the system hasn’t been decentralized and distributed at the host level. If that wasn’t the case, then both our users and us would have much more nuisance around everything. And for Avalon, users are number 1.
In the future, we might expect this principle to be at the data center level, though for many, this sounds like science fiction.
Let’s imagine a situation where a plane crashes in a data center and physically destroys it, and in a couple of minutes we make everything in the other data center operational, as if nothing had happened. We’re talking about that.
Companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as other major players already have such geographic redundancies, so the “backup” data center takes everything from the one that is down.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Unlike VR and AR technology, artificial intelligence records a huge growth over a short period of time, precisely because of the variety in possibilities of its application.
Artificial Intelligence can find its application almost everywhere, as well as in web hosting. It has already transformed many industries, whether they are online or offline, and some of the first signs of transformation are felt in our industry, as AI has already started to incorporate and influence many websites around the world.
The cloud technology we have been talking about is a particularly useful ground for implementing AI software solutions. We are witnessing daily emergence of new malware, and, as it seems, their development is virtually impossible to track and protect from in time.
One of the great advantages of AI technology is that it can recognize the threat in its early emergence and inform us of the potential danger before the damage arises (for example, if our domain is the target of a potential cyber attack).
As we write this, Avalon finances just one such project — “Application of Artificial Intelligence in Hosting“, which is being conducted within a Ph.D. dissertation at Split Faculty of Science.
The research in which we are participating has several directions, one of which is the AI’s application in technical support, then application regarding website security and personal information of users, and we are also considering the possibility of developing some new web services that would provide a different user experience to our users, as well as creating some new marketing tools.
The ideas are many, and time will tell which of them will prove to be fertile. The project has already been running for about a year and it is planned to last two years more in the existing form, where we mostly work with IBM Watson and rely on its solutions.
Based on all this, we can conclude that the future of web hosting is already present, everything is becoming cloud and decentralized. No one expects a hosting company to invent a miracle, because we already live in a time when miracles have already been created.
The only question is this — what will we use them for and when will the time come for “small” players to implement them on a daily basis?
Originally published at www.avalon.host.