I have read articles in several industry publications and spoke to some other web hosts, and all claim that web hosting will be very different in five or ten years. I must say that I agree, but how hosting will change? Many people say that the host of the future must oversell to survive. Others have said that paid hosting will be less popular and VPS servers are what most sites will be hosted on. I have also heard that in the next five years or so most sites will hosted on their own dedicated servers. One very compelling HostingTech article states the following:

You can read the complete article here . There is another interesting article discussing the future of web hosting from a different angle here .

Hosting will evolve and we must plan to evolve with it if we want to survive. I would even go as far as to say that the companies that have a plan and are ahead of the curve will be the most successful. What do you think the future holds for hosting companies? What should hosting companies do to prepare for the future?

Personally I think that VPS and dedicated servers are going to be the big thing in five to six years. I also think the companies that make it easier for novices to manage dedicated servers will have huge success. What do you think? My hope is that this discussion will get the hosts here planning for the future.

I posted this in another community I am a member of, but I decided to post it here as well to get input from the members of this forum.

Personally, I don't see the VPS getting so popular, and shared hosting losing so much of it. Most customers are not that complicated, and neither are their needs. I just don't see this changing fundamentally in the next couple of years.

Well I think the needs of customers in general will drastically change over the years. The Internet is evolving from a medium that used to serve static web pages to a dynamic and interactive meeting place for all people on the world. The last couple of years, interactive websites such as blogs and CMS' are getting very popular. This will cause (potentional) customers to start experimenting with blogs, CMS', guestbooks, forums, social bookmarking, streaming media, etc.

PS: I almost forgot to mention. Most web developers are currently using programming languages such as PHP, Perl and Java to develop dynamic websites. Lately, RAD (rapid application development) is getting popular. More and more people will start using frameworks such as RubyOnRails.

The only major changes we will see is bringing IPv6 into the fold officially.

Well in theory (and simply put), IPv6 (and IPv4) is just the network layer on which the Internet "runs on". I don't think the slow migration to IPv6 will have much effect on web hosting.