There has been some discussion around the Web about how regular Web hosts might be a dying breed. With all these specialized hosting solutions for photos, videos, backup, and music rolling around - who needs the shared services anymore? Well, I do think that specialized hosting is a good thing, but it is far from killing the Web hosting world that we know and love now.

Specialized, or niche hosting, is good for some things. You might not think it, but Flickr is a Web hosting company itself. It hosts your photos for you for free or for a fee. While this is great, I don’t think it will prevent professionals from wanting to set up their own Web site and portfolios on the Web.

For the most part, people are very picky and they like to have everything exactly the way they want it. Flickr does offer some customizing - but does not go that extra mile you could get if you did your own photo gallery script on your own Web site.

So I think instead of having specialized hosting replacing regular hosting, I think it will be more of an add on or addition to it. In the next few years, you will see more and more ways to combine these niche services in with your own brand and ideas. You can think of your shared hosting account as the trunk of your Web site tree. All these photo, video and music hosting services will act as branches. The better all of these new special services blend together the easier experience all of us will have because of it. That is a good thing.

[tags]niche, web hosting, web hosts, photo, video, hosting[/tags]