Hosting

The Internet has grown beyond a simple tool for a small number of education and government agencies over the last few years. The commercialization of the Internet has opened a brand new market for small, medium and large commercial bodies to provide access to this huge network of opportunity for business and home users alike. These companies are the sole providers of access to the ‘Information Super-Highway’ and it is therefore important to analyse how they have managed to survive in the past as well as their current and future success. The basis of this dissertation has concentrated mainly on the small to medium sized ISP providing services to the local business community and tends to concentrate on the issues involved here. It is important to look into periods of the past few years and how ISPs have developed into the providers that are common on the market place today. Through analysing the changes that ISPs have faced in the past, this will give a better gauge as to where the ISP needs to look to for future opportunities and more importantly, future survival. ...

As mentioned within the last chapter, Internet Service Providers have been forced and are currently being driven away from the traditional subscription access only service. Nowadays, many ISPs have started to offer free access to the Internet in order to drive customers to their services. The first of this kind of service within the United Kingdom was Freeserve. They originally had the backing of the Currys group to market their free Tier 3 ISP to the general public, which proved to be extremely successful. After the launch of Freeserve, many other Internet Service Providers began to offer free access through a dial-up service in order to compete within the market. ...

It has been surprising to see the amount of small Internet based companies that have ‘made it big’ within a very short period of time. Perhaps it has been the pure innovation of releasing a particular service on-line or offering goods that no one else had yet thought of. Perhaps it has just been a case of the company getting in before others had giving them the edge that would continue for many years to come. ...

The Internet has become a vast marketplace for global goods and services. For e-commerce to prosper, you have to feel safe about transmitting credit card and other financial information over the Internet. Because information traveling over the network actually passes through many computers along the way, the opportunity exists for someone to steal confidential information. Hackers also break into computers to steal data. No one really knows how often this actually happens. ...

The Internet has grown beyond a simple tool for a small number of education and government agencies over the last few years. The commercialization of the Internet has opened a brand new market for small, medium and large commercial bodies to provide access to this huge network of opportunity for business and home users alike. These companies are the sole providers of access to the ‘Information Super-Highway’ and it is therefore important to analyse how they have managed to survive in the past as well as their current and future success. The basis of this dissertation has concentrated mainly on the small to medium sized ISP providing services to the local business community and tends to concentrate on the issues involved here. It is important to look into periods of the past few years and how ISPs have developed into the providers that are common on the market place today. Through analysing the changes that ISPs have faced in the past, this will give a better gauge as to where the ISP needs to look to for future opportunities and more importantly, future survival. ...

Internet Service Providers (ISP) frequently have to face the question as to how they can protect their existing business and, at the same time, remain profitable in the future. For, on the one hand, the strong concentration process drastically shrinks the margins of pure access providing. New competitors, for example the major telecommunications companies, are flooding the market with ever cheaper offers. Prices continue to fall. And customers, who are becoming more and more “literate”, are now designing their own HTML pages. To quote a study issued by the European Union (EG DGXIII.A3) ISPs will not survive in the long term if they do not provide add-on services such as consulting or electronic publishing. ...