A user's guide to web hosting industry in India.

Website Hosting

If you want to take part in the internet as a business, information resource, directory, or to share data, information and knowledge with the many people and communities on the internet, you have to own a piece of space in cyberspace - the space that you call a website. The website (data) needs to b hosted on special computers, called servers, that remain online and accessible 24 hours a day.

Web hosting empowers you and anyone with a computer and internet connection to own a piece of cyberspace. In your space, you can have news, bulletins, documents, data, files (your web site) and your own post office (mail server) to accept mail, all in the context of you or your business. In a web-hosting environment, you are offered a web site to place your files, data, documents, and bulletins for people to access with their web browser and an email server for you to send and receive email messages. The web host will also provide you a means to get an address for people to get to your web site with a web browser and post email to you.

In a web-hosting environment, your area is defined as disk space and network transfer. Disk space is measured in Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB). Megabyte roughly means 1,024,000 characters and Gigabyte roughly means 1,024 Million characters. These amounts determine how many files, documents, or data you can have on your web site. Network Transfer is also measured in Megabytes or gigabytes which determines how much data (how many of your files, documents or data) can be downloaded (transferred to) people accessing your web site. The more people, or the more data each person accesses on your web site the more data is transferred on the network. The more disk space and network transfer you use the greater percentage of the web-hosting environment you are using -- therefore the higher the rent.

Web Hosting Industry in India

Indian hosting market has grown with the IT revolution taking place in India. The availability of broadband, better infrastructure and introduction of computer education in all schools has fuelled the growth of web hosting industry in India. Most Indian web hosting companies which started off as resller hosting companies have now grown up to become mature hosting comanies in themselves, most having their own servers and many even have their own data centers in US and India.

As the hosting market grows in India, the demand for data centers and hosting services has increased exponentially. It is estimated that the Indian data center market is worth $100 million and could reach close to $200 million by 2009. The Indian hosting and data center market is growing at a compounded annual rate of 21 percent. The web hosting market in India will show the highest growth in Asia-Pacific and grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24% till 2008, according to a study.

Asian Data Center market by a compound annual growth rate of 11.5 percent over the period from 2006 to 2010, making India the fastest growing market in the world. The data center industry in India is expected to grow exponentially with nearly 1,700 square feet of planned data center space in India by 2010. Combined with the more than 50 new telcos sprouting up in India, the build would create a significant emergence of data centers in the country.

The Indian software and BPO segment will grow at a rate of more than 16 per cent to become a $132 billion industry by 2012, global infotech analyst International Data Corporation (IDC) said today.

Web hosting services market in India is forecast to grow to $ 95.14 million from $ 40.45 million in 2004 at a CAGR of 24 per cent, which is the highest in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, the study by research firm IDC said. The emerging markets of India and China were found to be the fastest growing markets for Web hosting services. The overall Asia-Pacific market for web hosting services spending will increase from $ 521 million in 2004 to $ 924 million by 2008, representing a compound annual growth rate of 15 per cent from 2004 to 2008.

Following the rebound of the economy, there has been a renewed business focus to develop an e-business model. This is seen to drive the next level of growth in Web hosting services, particularly at the management services level where the "always-on" networked business environment is the prerequisite for survival in today's business environment.

Increasing Demand for Indian Hosting Companies

Internet users increasingly search on the net to look for an Indian hosting company to fulfill their hosting needs. If you understand search engine optimization (SEO), you can easily check the most searched for keywords by Indian web users. Our research shows that the following are some of the most frequently used keywords for searching for an Indian web hosting company:

As is more than evident in this list, the Indian people are increasingly looking for India based companies to fulfill their hosting needs. The exponentially growing hosting industry in India has now even started attracting foreign players. But the problem is that Indian customers increasingly look for cheap web hosting in India. The demand for cheap hosting has seen a price war in Indian hosting market and many hosting companies are now even offering free web hosting. But there is nothing really 'free' so all these offers for free hosting come with a catch - which is usually related to bandwidth usage, limited ftp or something similar. In this war to give cheap hosting on Linux and Windows, the quality does suffer. The primary growth markets in Indian webhosting industry are cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad, Jaipur and Pune.

The primary market areas for the Indian web hosting companies are:

Linux Hosting in India

Linux hosting is very flexible and is much easier to control, not to mention licensing issues where Linux is free and Windows comes with a price. Take Cpanel for a moment. Cpanel is a control panel built for hosting, but works on Linux. This is probably one of the more popular control panels in the industry and works well with Linux. You can have multiple FTP accounts, offer a jail version which is a VPS oriented which gives root access and still under a shared environment.

On the whole, Linux hosting is cheaper, some say faster and easier to use. In the opinions of Linux users, Linux is more stable and does not require system shutdowns every time an upgrade, patch implementation or install is implemented. Again, this reduces downtime and shows the resilience of next generation hosting.

For more details, see the Linux Hosting in India.

Windows Hosting in India

Microsoft Windows 2003 Server is one of the most widely used hosting platforms for small businesses. It's stability is far greater than that of Windows 2000. Features include: Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP), POP/SMTP Mail, Web Based Mail, Frontpage Extensions, ODBC Database Support etc. Microsoft has now lanucnhed windows 2008 and many Indian companies have started offering Windows 2008 hosting.

For more details, see the Windows Hosting in India

Resller Hosting in India

Reseller hosting is a form of web hosting wherein the account owner has the ability to use his/her allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites on behalf of third parties. The reseller purchases the host's services wholesale and then sells them to his customers for a profit. The certain portion of hard drive and bandwidth is allocated to reseller account. In order to achieve this the reseller may rent a dedicated server from a hosting company or resell shared hosting services. The typical web hosting reseller might be a web design firm, web developer or systems integrator who offers web hosting as an add-on service. Reseller hosting is also an inexpensive way for web hosting entrepreneurs to start a company. Most reseller hosting plans allow resellers to create their own service plans and choose their own pricing structure. In many cases, resellers are able to establish their own branding via customized control panels and name servers.

For more details, see the Reseller Hosting in India

Dedicated Server Hosting in India

A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting where the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system (Red hat, Linux, Windows, Unix etc), hardware (Intel, AMD etc), etc. Server administration can usually be provided by the hosting company as an add-on service. In the Web hosting business, a dedicated server is typically a rented service. The user rents the server, software and an Internet connection from the Web host.

For more details, see the Dedicated Server Hosting in India

Email Hosting in India

An email hosting service is an Internet hosting service that runs email servers. Email hosting services usually offer premium email at a cost as opposed to advertising supported free email or free webmail. They cater mostly to demanding email users and Small and Mid Size (SME) businesses, while larger enterprises usually run their own email hosting service. Email hosting providers allow for premium email services along with custom configurations and large number of accounts. Most email hosting providers offer advanced premium email solutions hosted on dedicated custom email platforms (Exchange, RighMX etc). The technology and offerings of different email hosting providers can therefore vary with different needs. Email offered by most webhosting companies is usually standardized POP3 based email and webmail based on open source webmail applications like Horde or Squirrelmail. Almost all webhosting providers offer standard basic email while not all email hosting providers offer webhosting.

For more details, see the Business Email Hosting in India