When a respected analyst house like The Yankee Group suggests that the web hosting market in Western Europe is set to be worth around £5.2bn by 2006, it is little wonder that there are so many companies offering their outsourcing services and promoting their applications. After all, with such a lucrative pot of gold on offer, who would not want to be involved? Web-hosting firms surely have never had it so good.
The reality at the moment, however, is somewhat different. The market has been through considerable turmoil during the past 18 months, with major overcapacity in data centres leading to many of the original companies either going out of business altogether or finding themselves having to go through painful restructuring and reduction in size and ambition.
