Web Hosting? What Web Hosting?

The folks over at Royal Pingdom have discovered an interesting trend: Google Trends shows that the number of searches for both “web hosting” and “hosting” has decreased quite rapidly in the past few years.

This could be for any number of reasons, as they’ve noticed in the post: change of terminology, or people using sources other than Google to find about web hosting.

My guess, though, is that web hosting is just no longer an issue for most users. Remember the Internet 5 or 10 years ago? If you wanted to start any kind of project on the Internet, no matter how small, the first thing everyone told you was to find a good web host. Now, you can do a whole lot of stuff without ever having to worry about web hosting. Want to create a gallery? Flickr. Blog? Wordpress. Post videos? Youtube. Web hosting is there, somewhere underneath it all, but you don’t need to worry about it - just like you don’t have to worry about having electricity.

It’s a logical course of events. The end users don’t have to worry about the sheer foundations of the Internet any more; they can focus on a specific service they need and let the provider worry about the hosting and other “unimportant” details.

In fact, I’ve checked out what Google Trends says about some other services that once seemed to be growing unstoppably. “Web design,” for example, is on an even sharper decline. “Photo sharing” and “video sharing,” however, are doing better than ever, and “social networking“, you guessed it, is on an even steeper incline.

This doesn’t mean that these services are no longer needed; it merely means that the majority of users don’t need to know about them, just like they don’t need to know about the intricacies of the way their 16 valve car engine burns fuel. On the Internet, however, these large scale changes are happening faster than in other industries; if you’re building an Internet business, you better be willing to adapt fast.

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