The decline of "web hosting" - interesting google trend. Thoughts?

Found this google search trend quite interesting. A massive decline in people searching for web hosting since 2004.

Do you think there is no longer a rush for everyone to have an online presence or do you think everyone (people not businesses) now know just go straight to tumblr/wordpress.com?

 

Hmm interesting. I think the emergence of social media also has a large impact... instead of making their own website people are instead making fan pages etc on facebook or tumblr etc.

 

I think the fact domain registrars almost throw hosting in for free is partly responsible for the decline.

Most small businesses I have worked with just register and host at the same place, they all offer it now... GoDaddy, Namecheap, 123-reg... Any fucker can open a reseller account and start their own hosting business. There is no barrier for entry and everyone is doing what they can to undercut everyone else.

 

On UK tv there are ads for godaddy that offer websites for £1, also wix is advertised a lot. As with most things nowadays people want instant things

 

i think it's a combination of the two, there are many places where you can get a very good and free blog online, so many do it like this, i've seen a lot of businesses that have only a facebook page, not even a free blog, so there's that. combined with what others said, everybody offers hosting at cheap prices and most are working decently so the need to switch often isn't there anymore thus fewer searches.

 

I agree facebook played a big part. I know a lot of businesses that only have facebook pages as it's free, no hosting worries, don't have to train staff etc.
They seem happy to just have that.

 

Gona agree with second part. Lots of people just buy hosting same place as domain. And domain sellers done great job with their lead funnels to make customer stay with their services till the end. Discounts, transfer restrictions or problems and other issues also work great for big players.

 

Maybe it is just that everyone already has hosting now

 

There are many companies that get hosting for years at a time, and they usually stay at the hosting provider when it comes time to renew.

 

This right here.

Or these people had no clue what web hosting was in 2004 when you started your search, OP, and now a lot more people know what web hosting is.

 

I totally agree with @Ste Fishkin 's opinion. With many sites that provide free reseller hosting, the free hosting providers grow by a huge number each day. Anyone with a domain and email address could virtually start a free hosting site nowadays and they wouldn't even have to worry about downtimes. So, basically people have forgotten the fact that from time to time, a good Hosting provider emerges which provides good load speed (which is extremely important for getting ranked), but no one actually cares about that stuff when they could host their sites for free disregarding the site speed and such elements.

 

Namecheap offers $9.88 per year hosting so they get people that just bought a domain. But it sucks so much to use, both them and godaddy seem to take hours to set up correctly with DNS.

 

I used the $9.88 hosting the other day actually doing a simple WP site for a house mate...

It was as good as any other hosting I've used. Domain was live in seconds as always with NameCheap.

I hate to say it, but did you do it wrong?

 

The Namecheap Hosting DNS didn't go live right away, so i had to switch to cloudflare and that even took longer compared to when I used a VPS.

They had some problems earlier in the day with logging in and ordering, so maybe there was some small problems with hosting.

 

I think, More people are looking on Forums and going after those companies which airs their ads on television!
just my 2 cents!

 

Thanks for the feedback all. Pretty interesting theories. Was thinking of entering this niche as an affiliate because I'd genuinely enjoy it. Not so sure now....might be way over crowded....

 

I agree with what many other people have said. With the ease of social media, idiots can post their useless thoughts without having to be bothered with learning how to setup/configure a server or create even a basic website. Its really a shame as that used to help keep some of the more useless brainwaves from finding their way to my computer screen. Now any mouth breather with a pulse can put their thoughts on display in 2 clicks or less

 

This is perhaps the biggest reason!

 

Was checking some other things and look at this. Makes no sense to me. Linux is more popular now than ever. Android is Linux, internet of things is mostly Linux. Raspberry pi's are Linux. List goes on and on. But search volume is down. Weird eh!?

 

The linux one is probably more to do with people not searching directly for linux. When i search i use android or raspberry pie and not android linux or so. Back in 2004 most people were probably searching for distros to use or any information on it. Just a theory though