According to some extremely long and painstaking research, I have found 2004 to be the pinnacle of Web Hosting. If you use Google Trends you would probably say that 2004 was the dot com bubble burst for Web hosting.

Search on any web hosting related term and you will see a huge spike in 2004. As the years go by, the amount of searching done on web hosting continues to decrease. Was this because the vast majority of Google users were Web hosting faithful or technologically inclined? Do users now search for more things that deal with the latest Paris Hilton scandal? Or could it be that the amount of information, the buzz as it were, has seemingly died off?

Well I had to answer the first question. Searching for other pop culture keywords did not reveal anything major. The trends did not fit the questions instead of lowered 2004 results increasing. So the next part is to examine the information.

So following the news articles, did 2004 have more news? Again a dead end. The graph below is a
“faithful” representation of web hosting news items from 1998 to today (source Google News):

More investigation was required. Continuing on my journey of truth I looked for what the sources where and then it hit me. Newspapers such as USA Today were reporting on web hosting in 2004 and the big time player’s interesting in web hosting began to ebb.

Two things that should also be considered. In 2004, a lot of marketing capital was flowing and web hosts were more content in sending out ad dollars than press releases.

The other thing to consider is how we navigate across the Net. Communities and social sites far higher than they were back then and with sites being interlinked its sometimes easier to find a host though acquaintances and friends than it is through Google.

On the whole, this seems to be a far more complex question to answer than I originally figured. I will am undaunted however. I am going to revisit this problem and find the answer. Until that time happy hosting!