Web Hosting Buddy’s 2017 Year in Review
With the holiday season upon us, it’s time to take a moment to look back at 2017! What happened in the world of web hosting that was notable? Did anything major happen this year affecting people who build websites?
2017 has been a great year for the technology sector, especially the web hosting and web development world. Just this year, we’ve seen tremendous growth! Here are some fascinating numbers from 2017:
- As of December 2017, there are 3.8 billion Internet users, this is up 11% from 2016
- There are 332.9 million registered domain names, up almost 3 million from 2016
- The Internet has over 1.3 billion (with a “B”) live websites, which is up 250 million from 2016
- Ecommerce made up about 2 trillion in sales for the year
- There are currently more mobile Internet users than desktop/laptop users
When you take a moment to consider the gravity of those numbers, they are quite staggering! They point toward an extremely bright future for the Internet! But what about hosting-specific events in 2017? What happened in that world? Here are some of the things we’ve seen in 2017…
WordPress is Still King
Boasting a user base of more than 75 million and accounting for more than 20% of the entire Internet, WordPress is the most popular content management system for websites. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the ease of use that WordPress offers is pretty much unmatched by any other type of website software. On top of that, there’s a huge variety of amazing themes and designs that allow people have a beautiful website right out of the box!
Websites Are Being Hacked at an Alarming Rate
Because WordPress is becoming so popular, it’s also becoming an increasingly big target for hackers. Whether it’s to inject links, take over pages with spam, or to take control of another person’s website to send email or use their server for nefarious purposes, hacks have risen substantially in 2017 and despite the best efforts of security experts, it doesn’t look like this will change anytime soon.
Managed Hosting is Increasing in Popularity
As WordPress grows in its adoption rate, more people are looking for an “all-in-one” solution where they don’t have to monitor whether their site is up or down, don’t have to worry about backups, and where security is increased dramatically.
For people with these concerns, a managed WordPress host is probably the best way to go as they’re able to provide a lot of advantages that traditional hosting does not, especially for people who are new to hosting a website.
New Payment Methods and Systems are Emerging
You may have heard about Bitcoin in 2017, or maybe you haven’t—but the reality is that cryptocurrencies are becoming an increasingly popular way to pay for things online. This has caused many ecommerce websites to put some time and effort into figuring out how to accept Bitcoin payments. As the cryptocurrency adoption rates increase, you’ll definitely see Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum becoming more commonplace on the web. We predict that sometime in the not so distant future, they will be as common as PayPal and other digital methods of payment.
The Price of Basic Web Hosting Has Remained Relatively Steady
The average price of web hosting has been pretty steady and didn’t really increase in 2017, which is a good thing. A basic shared hosting account can still be had for $2.69/month in some situations and the price of managed WordPress hosting hasn’t increased either. Again, this is a positive thing because it allows regular people the opportunity to build and host their own websites for a very small amount of money.
