When I started in the hosting industry 13 years ago, it was worth about $40 billion. That’s pretty impressive bearing in mind the internet was born just 20 years earlier. Today it’s valued around $940 billion. Its staggering growth shows just how much (and how quickly) the hosting industry has expanded.
In that time, we’ve seen the explosion of cloud hosting and the cementing of market share by the three big cloud hosting providers - AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. We’ve also seen bare metal hosting providers modernize away from their traditional inflexible approach, long-term customer agreements and slow provisioning to far more scalable, flexible and cost-effective services. More recently, we’ve seen the end of the ‘cloud-first’ era and a move towards hybrid strategies and selective repatriation.
I’ve experienced these transitions as both a customer and a hosting provider, and I’ve learnt some important lessons along the way.
So, to reflect on my decade (and a bit) in the industry, I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learnt. Before I kick off, however, I think it’s important to caveat that these are very much my experiences and therefore come with a certain amount of bias. But I hope that as a hosting customer or buyer in 2026, they prove useful as food for thought, a discussion point or to provide a flavor of the hosting industry then and now.
Here are my six lessons:
Lesson 1: You’ll pay for cheap infrastructure in the end
The adage “you get what you pay for” could’ve been written about cheap infrastructure. What happens when infrastructure goes down? Your services or operations also go down, leading to loss of money and potentially reputation. Are you more likely to have regular downtime with cheaper infrastructure? Of course you are.
But when customers are buying infrastructure, they rarely ask the pointed questions: “What CPU models and generations do you deploy?”, “are drives consumer grade or data center grade?”, “what happens if a PSU or fan fails?”. No one seems to consider the long-term cost of maintenance when purchasing infrastructure.
As a customer, I urge you to ask any infrastructure hosting provider that you are considering working with - “how many maintenance-driven downtime instances did you have this year? ”. Also, look closely at what hardware that provider is recommending for you. Do they offer just one path from your server out to the internet? What happens if that path is disrupted at any point? Your server will go offline. So, specify multiple ISPs, core routers, switches and network ports to build in as much redundancy as possible.
It will cost a little more upfront but will cost your business far less in the long run.
Lesson 2: Regular evaluation of infrastructure is undervalued
Despite infrastructure being business-critical, it’s surprisingly undervalued and that’s shown in the way that many companies buy it. Specifically, who buys it. You may or may not be surprised to learn that the evaluation stage of buying infrastructure generally falls to junior employees who are not trained in buying and don’t have the wider business context. They are also often biased towards a certain supplier, which tends to be one of the hyperscale providers.
The well-known saying ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ could be updated today to ‘nobody ever got fired for buying AWS’.
Really, companies should have a dedicated procurement team or even better, a c-level team that works closely with the procurement team. And they need to invest in evaluation from the outset. Considering all options including bare metal cloud and hybrid architectures, the wider needs of the business and what it might require the infrastructure to enable 3, 6, 12 months down the line. As the industry and behaviors shift, so too should your infrastructure. But if you don’t evaluate regularly, how will you actually know where changes need to be made?
Lesson 3: Not all components are made equal
When purchasing hardware and looking at multiple different hosting providers, it’s tempting to want to make like-for-like comparisons based on a list of components.
Unfortunately, comparing providers in that way doesn’t work because the quality and performance of the components each one uses can differ vastly. Take CPUs. If you compare the same CPU from Intel or AMD to the same CPU elsewhere, there should be very little difference in performance. But when an infrastructure supplier offers desktop/consumer grade CPUs in a data center environment - which they are not designed for - the contrast is obvious. There are also cheap and expensive SSDs. As expected, the performance of cheap SSDs is significantly poorer than the more costly ones.
Likewise, budget suppliers will often cut corners when it comes to networking, especially in areas where customers are unlikely to look. Servers are offered with port speeds of 10Gbit/s or more, and customers assume that they will be able to use almost 100% of that available port speed at the same time. But – and this is where providers can be sneaky – the connection capacity between the top of rack switch and the distribution switch is only 20G, causing packet loss and disruption to services.
So, when you are next buying infrastructure, throw away that list of components and instead talk to the hosting providers about your business goals and how you need your infrastructure to support you achieving them. And expect that the packages they offer will vary between providers at different price points in the market.
