5 Key Web Hosting Trends For 2020

January 21, 2020 / Web Hosting

web hosting trends

As web hosting is a critical element of running a website, it is important that owners keep their eye on developments within the hosting world. Like every other IT related field, change is continuous and progress is rapid, and 2020 promises to see some exciting advances. In this post, we’ll look at the major hosting trends expected in the coming year.

  1. Eco-friendly hosting
    Like everyone else, hosting companies are fully aware of the need to reduce their impact on the environment and in 2020, we’ll see increased efforts to put practical, environmentally-friendly solutions into place. One key area is the need to reduce the carbon footprint of datacentres which need significant supplies of energy to run thousands of servers and keep them cool.
    To do this, we’ll see more hosts using energy-efficient servers, especially those with SSD drives that, unlike HDD drives, have non-moving parts, require less energy and emit less heat. We’ll also see datacentres installed with intelligent lighting and cooling technologies and hosts opting to use greener energy to run their datacentres. While there’s still a way to go before the hosting community becomes carbon neutral, increasing demand from both consumers and government will see accelerated efforts this year.
  2. More users doing more things in the cloud
    Cloud hosting has now become almost universal. According to the most recent study from researchers 451, 90% of businesses have now migrated part of their IT services to the cloud. In 2020, the major growth will be in the number of operations that businesses undertake in cloud-hosted environments. Between 2018 and 2019, this increased from 48% to 60% and is expected to grow even more this year. Why is this happening? Simply because the cloud offers so many benefits. Its pay as you go pricing and scalability helps reduce costs and the technology available puts smaller companies on an even playing field with larger competitors. What’s more, it offers robust security, 100% uptime, unlimited bandwidth and storage, managed services, reliable backups and recovery and easy access to technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
  3. Increasing efforts to protect data
    While individual companies should be well aware of the need to protect the personal data they store about customers and employees, what they may not realise are the increasing efforts being made by their hosts to ensure that data stored on their servers is also secure. While the ultimate responsibility for the data you collect lies with you, 2020 will see service providers take increasing action to make sure that data is as safe as possible.
    This year expect to see more hosting providers implement two-factor authentication for webmasters so that the hacking of admin and other accounts can only take place if the hacker also has access to the user’s mobile phone. At the same time, you’ll be given more opportunity to take advantage of security features such as SSL certificates and data encryption while seeing more next-gen firewalls, intrusion prevention and anti-malware systems being incorporated into your hosting packages.
  4. The rise of virtualisation
    2020 will see an increasing shift towards virtualisation with many web hosts moving shared hosting solutions to the cloud (we’ve already done this at WHUK) and offering a wider range of virtual private servers (VPS) which deliver the power, performance and security of mini dedicated servers at a price little more than the cost of shared hosting. 
    VPS has already become one of the major trends in web hosting but this year we will see more smaller companies opting to benefit from its enormous potential.
  5. The demise of the website builder
    Website builders have been very popular over the last decade, providing people with the means to create websites very easily. They do, however, have many drawbacks. The software used to create them offers limited tools and add-ons to develop truly professional sites, there is little opportunity to improve SEO and many of the companies that provide them lack the hosting expertise that new website owners need from technical support. Indeed, many of them aren’t hosts at all but resellers using a third-party hosting solution themselves. In addition, users often find themselves paying significantly more for the service than they would with a traditional web host.
    When website builders first became fashionable, many web hosts introduced their own. The first sign that they were becoming less popular is that a lot of those web hosts have now abandoned their web builders because of lack of demand. Users, in general, are still opting for CMS like WordPress which even has its own dedicated hosting solutions. Indeed from WordPress 5.0 onwards, the new content editor makes it just as simple to use as a website builder but with the addition of the thousands of free themes and tens of thousands of free plugins that can help users make any kind of website for any purpose. And of course, WordPress and other CMS users can take their pick from any web host, getting the best package and pricing for their needs, together with services like domain registration, cloud storage, remote backups, guaranteed uptime, and 24×7 technical support.

Conclusion

The success of your online venture relies significantly on the quality of the hosting you choose and this year will see web hosting continue to move forward. 2020 offers greener hosting, continued cloud development, increased security, a shift towards virtualisation and the increasing abandonment, by web hosts at least, of low-quality web builders.

If you need high-quality hosting for your site, visit our homepage to see our range of hosting packages.    

Author

  • Niraj Chhajed

    I'm a SEO and SMM Specialist with a passion for sharing insights on website hosting, development, and technology to help businesses thrive online.

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