I was reading on the Web Hosting Industry Review that APlus.Net now offers Coppermine photo galleries with its web hosting plans. Managing and organizing digital photos can be frustrating, the company says. And Wikipedia agrees that as photo album scripts go, Coppermine is easy to install and configure.
Um, hasn't APlus CEO Ivan Vachovsky heard of Flickr? Even my neighbor, a retired Department of Engraving clerk, has an account. And he thinks that managing and organizing digital photos is a piece of cake. (Installing/configuring scripts, on the other hand, is not something he'd ever attempt.) Besides, what end users really want these days is to upload and share vidoes. Hasn't Ivan read that in aggregate, clips on YouTube are viewed 100 million times a day? In contrast, how much exposure could the owner of a Coppermine photo album hope to generate?
I hate it when people in the web hosting industry act as if the outside world doesn't exist. The only thing worse than that is the rampant over-selling that gets more out of hand everyday. APlus has one-upped 1&1 and GoDaddy by including not 1500 GB, not 2000 GB, but 2500 GB of monthly bandwidth with its $5.95 web hosting plan. I know from my days at EV1Servers that high-quality connectivity costs MUCH more than that. But newcomers to the web hosting world won't have a clue. In their minds, the value of bandwidth will forever be $0.002 per GB. And now every single web hosting provider will have to live up to that expectation. Sucks, eh?
Will Charnock from ThePlanet just pointed out that according to Google Trends, search volume for web hosting has been steadily declining. Check out this comparison between "web hosting" (blue) and "Photobucket" (red; a highly trafficked photo sharing site co-founded by former Level 3 exec Alex Welch). Could insanely low bandwidth prices reverse this trend? Somehow I doubt it.
In other news, yesterday CitiBank analyst Brent Thill gave SalesForce.com's shares a "buy" rating because the company has "important differentiators". According to MarketWatch, Thill was impressed that fewer than 10% of prospects at a Salesforce.com event said they were considering any competitor's products.
And guess what?? SalesForce.com's entry level service plan includes just 1GB of storage. While APlus.Net offers 190x more disk space, I'll bet 90% of its prospects are considering several other competitors' products.
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