The state of the Irish Hosting business

jmcc

This was posted in a thread on marketing but it may be of more interest here.
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There is a lot of competition in the Irish hosting business. Over the last few years, the Irish market has changed from being an ISP dominated one to one dominated by the Hosting Service Providers (HSPs). The ISPs now account for less than 24% of the Irish market. The market itself is really two sections - dedicated servers and colocation, and the cheaper shared hosting or retail. The bulk of the market is in the retail hosting but the big money is in the dedicated hosting services.

The bulk of the Irish market is spread among the top 22 hosters, each of which hosts over 500 domains. The largest Irish hoster is Hosting 365. The two ISPs, Eircom and Esat are also significant hosters. Eircom is making an effort to regain some of its lost ground in retail hosting. Esat does not seem to doing much about the retail market and has been losing customers continually. Both Eircom and Esat are overrepresented in .ie domains. This is because the traditional .ie market used the ISPs and the "discounts" introduced by IEDR worked in favour of the large hosters such as Eircom, Esat and others. As a result, the dynamics of the .ie market are artificially skewed, so much so that real competition is subdued. The gTLD market, (com/net/org/biz/info) is far more vibrant and the numbers of CNOIB registrations each month always exceed the numbers of .ie registrations.

Competition in the low end of the gTLD market for Irish hosters has not always been fierce. But with the entry of Webhostingireland.ie into the market in April 2004, the other hosters began to take notice. Until that time, the low end of the market was largely the province of Hosting365. The growth of Webhostingireland.ie from 2004 to the present has been ballistic. It has grown to be one of the top hosters. As a result, it encouraged Novara, Blacknight and some others such as Letshost to pay attention to the budget hosting market with varying results.

But in real terms, the competition is going to hit a few Irish hosters hard in the next few months as the market consolidates.

One HSP that has made the transition to being an ISP has almost completely neglected its hosting business and has been almost flat-line for the past year. One of the more recent advertising campaigns of a certain hoster has been less than successful in pure growth terms. There is also a split beginning to become apparent between web developers who offer hosting and pure play Hosting Service Providers.

The November market breakdown is below and shows how the market is spread across hosters..

Hoster Tiers : Market Shares As Of 01 November 2005 - Identified Domains = 107184

Hosters - Domains - Market Share - Market Segments
Tier 1 22 24955 23.28% Traditional Early Market Hosters (ISPs)
Tier 2 24 57768 53.90% Hosting Service Providers > 500 domains
Tier 3 65 13925 12.99% HSPs 101 - 500 domains
Tier 4 324 9814 9.16% HSPs/Web Developers 7 - 100 domains
Tier 5 392 843 0.98% Individuals/Firms/Web Developers < 7 domains
Tier 6 44 1056 0.99% Educational And Government And Registry

The webhosting.info stats are nice if you want colourful graphs and a rough view of the top of the Irish market. However I do not consider webhosting.info stats to be accurate as there are some fundamental mathematical problems with tracking domain registrations that they, webhosting.info, have not solved properly. Another major source of inaccuracy seems to be the ease with which a hoster can add the nameservers of its resellers to provide a somewhat inflated view of its own importance. And of course as Blacknight pointed out, they do not include .ie cctld - something that WhoisIreland.com does.
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Regards...jmcc
Edit Reason - fixing some typos.

Ph3n0m

that said, http://www.webhostingireland.ie/ really needs to get something online asap - a blank page doesnt inspire confidence at all

jmcc

Ph3n0m wrote:

that said, http://www.webhostingireland.ie/ really needs to get something online asap - a blank page doesnt inspire confidence at all

They have a number of brands (www.pro.ie etc) but their nameservers are webhostingireland.ie. Out of habit, I refer to hosters using their nameservers, Still though, webhostingireland really put the wind up the other major hosters in Ireland.

Regards...jmcc

Ph3n0m

http://www.pro.ie/webdesign/technology.htm - hmmm their sponsors pages are quite "interesting" especially the tesco grocery shopping page - in fact I wonder when the last time they checked all their internal and external links?