Let’s take a look at the trends that shaped the web hosting industry in 2005. Will they continue to be important in 2006?Now that the New Year’s parties are over, the champagne all finished, cake eaten, noisemakers put away, and confetti cleaned up, it’s time to take a look back at 2005 and see how the year shaped up for the web hosting community. The biggest trend, to nobody’s surprise, was expansion. This expressed itself in a variety of ways, from companies purchasing data centers to companies purchasing other companies.

The trend of data center expansion is particularly noteworthy. For the past few years, most web hosts have been able to tap into plenty of excess, unused data center space to support their growth. But 2005 saw significant construction and acquisition of data center space, signaling that web hosting demand is at last catching up with supply.

C I Host, for example, opened an entirely new data center facility in July. Located in Newark, New Jersey, near both Rutgers University and Manhattan, the new facility has a direct, private fiber connection to C I Host’s planned London facility. The company also added to its Dallas area data center, which already boasts 38,000 square feet.

Peak 10 expanded two of its data centers, in Raleigh and Louisville. The expansion – which adds 10,000 square feet to the Louisville data center alone – will support redundancy options for Peak 10’s clients.

In September, 365 Main acquired a huge data center – 131,000 square feet – in El Segundo, California.

AT&T opened two data centers this year, one in California and one in China. That brings the telecommunications giant’s total number of data centers worldwide to 28. More specifically, the California data center doubled AT&T’s hosting capacity in the San Francisco area, and the data center in China was the first AT&T facility to offer hosting on the Chinese mainland. (You’ll be hearing more about AT&T later in this article).

But most companies would be hard put to beat Digital Realty Trust’s space additions in 2005. The company added seven – count them, seven – new data centers. Five of the data centers, plus an office building, are located in Denver, Colorado. The other two are in California. Digital added the whopping 642,000 square feet for an equally whopping $109 million. That doesn’t even count the two data center properties Digital purchased in Europe: the IBM Technology Park in Mainz, Germany, and the Geneva Data Center in Geneva, Switzerland.

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