Since starting my podcast on and about the Web hosting world almost two years ago, one of the biggest complaints I get is that there are too many Web hosts out there to choose from. Everybody wants to know who is the best, or if the company they are looking at is any good at all. Well, I have covered how to shop for Web hosting before in the past. The question I want to answer is, are there too many Web hosts out there?

No. How could I say that? There are hundreds of Web hosts out there from every walk of life. There are quality Web hosts, there are not so good Web hosts. There are Web hosts that started up last week and there are Web hosts that have been going the past ten years.

Couldn’t we cut the fat in a few places at least, if the consumer had it their way?

No. The reason I say no is because of competition. There are few areas of business that have as much competition as the Web hosting industry. A few years back there might have only been a few, but thanks to reseller accounts and collocation there are thousands to choose from. The reason that competition is good for all of us is because it drives the prices of the hosting accounts down. Starting up a Web site does not cost and arm and a leg.

You could get away spending less that $50 to get yourself setup with a year’s worth of hosting if you did your shopping right.

The more competition there is, the more services you get as well. Everybody is trying to undercut the next guy’s prices and overcut his services. You get more bandwidth, more disk space and more scripts than ever before these days. Getting more of anything can not be a bad thing at all.

If for some unknown reason, the number of Web hosts out there dropped, then our prices would go up and there wouldn’t be as many new Web sites coming up from nothing on the Web. It would hurt not only the Web hosting business, but the Internet economy in a whole.

I have said before that the Web hosting world is the backbone of the Internet, and if we fall the rest of the Web will come tumbling down as well. So the next time you want to complain about having too many choices and too many companies going after your dollar, just think how life might be without so much selection and then thank your lucky stars that you have what you have.

[tags]hosts, web hosting, selection, choices, competition, thoughts[/tags]