We noticed an interesting thing the other day while doing some research with Google Trends. The number of searches in Google for the term “web hosting” has decreased a lot in the last four years.
Compared to the high points in 2004, there only seems to be ¼ as many searches for web hosting in 2008. Is the general interest for web hosting decreasing, even though the web as a whole is growing? It should be pointed out that the search term “hosting” shows the same downward curve.
We couldn’t help but discuss this graph here in the Pingdom office. Many of us have a past in the web hosting industry, and of course we work with web hosting companies every day because of our uptime monitoring service, so we are highly interested in the industry.
Some possible reasons for this downward trend could be:
- The web hosting market is getting increasingly saturated.
- Terminology is changing, so people are searching for other things. (But in that case what?)
- People interested in web hosting are increasingly using other avenues than Google to find information. (For example web hosting forums and social networks.)
These are just theories. Truth be told, we really don’t know.
What do you think?
