How The Web Hosting Market Has Changed

Andreas Maurer Transcript

Intro - 00: 00:01: Welcome to Beyond The Screen: An IONOS Podcast, where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business’ online presence. Hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and IT industry, and exploring how the IONOS brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. We’re your hosts, Joe Nash and Liz Moy.

Joe - 00: 00:22: Hi, and welcome to Beyond The Screen podcast. I’m your host, Joe Nash, and today I’m joined by Andreas Maurer, head of public relations at IONOS, for a chat about the history and development of internet hosting. Andreas, thank you for joining me today.

Andreas - 00: 00:33: Hi Joe, great being here.

Joe - 00: 00:35: I’m very excited to chat. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, the history of I kind of web hosting and how that has evolved. I feel like one of the tensions for me and my career at least is like I grew up with a very particular version of, you know, getting a website online and it’s very different now. And so I’m always very interested in this topic and how things have changed. So you’ve been working in this field for, I believe it was over 25 years. Is that correct?

Andreas - 00: 00:58: Yes, probably. Definitely in the field of PR. And I think I was lucky to be at university at the right time because the first time I heard of the Internet was I think in 1993. And actually, I also called it already the World Wide Web, although I didn’t know what it was yet at the time. Yeah, of course. I remember - I think it was also in ’93, I was on an excursion with the university class in Uppsala in Sweden. And there we got the first introduction of this World Wide Web. I don’t remember if they actually named it that way. Very fancy. And it was, ah, you need a very sophisticated high-end machine to use this and to never try to write any garbage and anything that looks encrypted because then the NSA will be on your back right away. So it was very fancy. So I’m from Germany and I decided to go to the US to study abroad for a year. And that’s actually when I played around with the Internet at my university and found out about my school there. And actually being in the US in ’94, ’95 was great because of course the States were like three years ahead of Europe. So there I could see a lot and also could see how technology works. I think at that time really nobody talked about web hosting providers, commercial providers. But actually if you wanted to be on the web, you needed to be either in the government, the military or at a university, at a research institution. So that was quite a good situation. But then I think pretty quickly the first commercial hosting company showed up. So I actually created my first homepage, my personal homepage, I think in 1994. And actually also I think in 1995, the first homepage for my university where I worked in the PR department as an intern or working student. But I had to hard code HTML to learn everything from sketch. I still remember probably FTPing it up onto something. Yes, definitely. So how I learned for the first time about the Internet was actually my dorm in Berlin because I had an American exchange student living in my hallway. And she once told me, I’m writing mails or letters with my family at home via the computer. And that was it was, how does this work? So I went to our IT department and asked for that. And the answer was that they pushed a big blue book in front of me, which said Introduction to Unix. Of course, I had no idea. I wasn’t a computer science student or so, but that was really my first impression. Yeah. And then so my first job was actually not Internet related. But my second one was, which was with UUNET, a company that doesn’t exist anymore. Or nowadays, the remainders are part of Verizon. But UUNET at that time, I think I joined them in 1997. UUNET was one of the big hosting companies besides being a telco. And their hosting meant that they had huge mainframe systems. I think actually the hosting was still in the US, while I was working in Germany, but it was really like the magic sauce to work with that. And in Germany, actually, one of the first I learned about this company while I worked at the UUNET was Schlund+Partner, which was founded in 1995 in Karlsruhe. And that’s actually the source of what today is IONOS. And Schlund+Partner was founded by a guy, Andreas Gauger, who had a Microsoft software company, I think was even before Windows. So he wrote MS-DOS software. And one of his employees once told him, oh, I read in this computer magazine about this thing called the Internet. And I think this might be the next big thing. And then Andreas told him, okay, you can devote half of your time working for that. And out of that came Schlund+Partner. And then the company grew big because three students actually came by and asked if they could hook up their Linux server with this company because they had this super fast 64 kilobit Internet connection. And that’s actually how this company got started. Again, if you talk about the technology at that point, the first server, I think, first web hosting server from Schlund+Partner was a WindowsNT PC that was on the desk of the CEO. So that’s where the pages were hosted. And then things grew. So at that time, really, there was still, I would say probably a handful, two handful of hosting companies, but then the market started to grow.

Joe - 00: 04:50: Of course, I imagine it grew very quickly as well once it got going.

Andreas - 00: 04:53: Yeah, then in the mid-1990s, there was kind of a gold rush with which, of course, later also turned into the dot-com bubble, which I also experienced myself. But still many companies came up, the connections got better. So suddenly you had a vast amount of companies in the late ’90s, 2000s, I think you saw a little bit more specialization and a lot of very small hosting companies that develop. Today, I would say we have some kind of segmentation. So we have players like IONOS, who really have the full-fledged package, but you also have very specialized companies either offering website builders or specialized e-commerce solution. And on the very high end, where IONOS also plays a part, is of course the actual cloud. And I think we’ll talk about this a little bit later. But it was quite an interesting journey, and I’m very happy that I was able to be a part of it.

Joe - 00: 05:47: Absolutely. Yeah. And you covered on a bunch of things that I think I want to try and go back to. So I guess one of the - you gave that journey of like, you know, the first talk about your first experience of web posting and then, you know, some of these players that came about. Like, how did I guess the nature of those web posts like change over that, you know, early ’90s to early 2000s period? Because if we just think about getting a website online now, a lot of those technologies just like straight up weren’t around, but you know, virtualization, which rely on now wasn’t really things worked. And we joked about FTP earlier, but my experience of early web posts, and I’m sure lots of people have kind of similar ideas is like, you know, you’ve got a share of a Linux server that you’re just FTPing some files up onto and maybe you have PHP, maybe you have some Perl, FireCGI, primarily it’s like static file hosting, right? Rather than apps.

Andreas - 00: 06:34: Exactly. That’s how it began. As I said, starting with plain HTML, you need to be able to code. Then when I joined UUNET, which is quite funny because UUNET was a hosting company itself, but I worked in marketing and was in charge of the company website. And my boss sent me actually in my first or second week, he sent me to a seminar to learn NetObjects Fusion. Now, if you remember the software, which is a, was a quite popular website creator software, but definitely nothing you would ever think of employing in the enterprise.

Joe - 00: 07:02: Kind of like equivalent to Microsoft Front Page, Dreamweaver area, right? Okay.

Andreas - 00: 07:05: Yeah, similar... Front Page, Dreamweaver, exactly. Tools like that. So that came up, but still it’s not really suitable for enterprise page. But that was of course a way for many people to develop homepages without being able to code. Cause like, if you remember Front Page, there’s, I mean, Front Page could still be complicated, but there was also a kind of drag and drop that you learn from Microsoft Office. Then there came stuff like Server Side Includes, SSI. So was that includes where you could actually have some text blocks that are code blocks that you could, for instance, for a footer or a header or a page that you could automatically include. So I saw that in the mid-nineties and then of course, PHP, which I think was developed already in 1993, but really became popular a little bit later with the LAMP stack in combination with MySQL databases, et cetera. That suddenly you were able to provide dynamic content, which also for me, again, I’m not a coder. I’m not a programmer. So I always did this as a hobby, but this was a revelation for me when I dive deep into WordPress, for instance. Also, actually one of my next jobs was with an enterprise content management software company. So I think I joined there in 1999, I think. So they sold software similar to what today we all do with WordPress or type of tree or Drupal content management software, but they sold it to companies and the pricing started at a 100,000, 200,000, I think was still a D-Mark, Deutsche Mark at that time for the package plus annual service fee and it worked. And it was what many, many big companies use the software. And then out of nowhere for me, suddenly open-source software like WordPress came up and that again, of course, was a huge change for the whole industry and I think WordPress was invented just, yeah, just actually this weekend celebrated its 20th birthday.

Joe - 00: 08:53: Oh, no way. I did not know that.

Andreas - 00: 08:55: Yeah. It’s amazing. Quite a success story. And it really democratized web publishing so much because the software was for free. Still not too easy, but even I was able to set up my WordPress blog in a couple of hours.

Joe - 00: 09:07: WordPress was also my introduction to like dynamic content. I again started on, you know, like static writing, static HTML and WordPress was when I first really encountered the idea that like, oh, I can make fancy apps using WordPress plugins and this kind of stuff. Um, sorry. Yeah.

Andreas - 00: 09:21: Yeah. And today, of course, we’ve moved one step further even with static page generators that I heard of only for the first time, two or three years ago, when we introduced our own products. For instance, where you can publish your whole website via GitHub, quite amazing thing for me as a layman, but technology is increasing so much. And I think the biggest change of course, that the CMS systems brought along was these differentiations between the admins who run the system, maybe who actually set up the design, the themes and the actual editors do not need to program anything anymore. So for instance, our newsroom at IONOS runs on WordPress. So we had quite long session with an agency that created a theme for us. Did all the programming, the coding and with a lot of loops, but once the system was set up and if I want to add a press release there, I need to upload the text or write the text, put in some pictures, maybe add in some links, but I don’t need any special knowledge anymore. I think that’s really amazing.

Joe - 00: 10:18: kind of the next step in, I guess, the democratization that we’re talking about with Fusion, with more people being able to use it without coding knowledge.

Andreas - 00: 10:24: So quite interesting. And on the other hand, of course, if you talk about things like these static page generators, it’s just another dimension, as I said, there. And it’s probably also for different type of pages even in our company. For instance, we have dynamic content like the newsroom, we have more static stuff like our shop page where we actually sell our products. And of course, we employ a lot of different technologies for that.

Joe - 00: 10:47: I guess that one question I guess that raises me is so, you know, these early days, web hosting was very much a, you know, you had to be technical to be using the web host at the time to actually get website online, you need very technical knowledge. And now, you know, there are technologies that you can employ as a non-technical person to have access to a website. And I imagine that’s changing the consumer relationship for web post and therefore your business as well, right? Because you’re, I imagine web hosting is now having to start serving people who aren’t necessarily building a website, they’re just putting a website they bought or a system that like WordPress that’s, you know, configured for them up online. So how did the business of web hosting change throughout that transition?

Andreas - 00: 11:28: I think what you just described means mainly that it has diversified because we still have these techies, we still have people who know how to code and that’s one of our key target groups at IONOS where we try to have really highly sophisticated high-end solutions. But on the other hand, we have this huge target group and that’s actually one of our core target groups SMBs, small and medium businesses. For instance, during the Pandemic we’ve seen it was just so important for small businesses to get their business digital somewhere because many people couldn’t go to a physical shop anymore. And of course, these people neither have the knowledge nor usually they have the right experts in their company. So you need solutions that are very easy to use stuff like website builders like our, my website that you can really use in a similar way that you would create a document in Microsoft Word or Google Docs where you’re just pushing your content and so on. And then of course, the individual leads are very different apart from the knowledge. So if you think about a small, I don’t know, lawyer or even a baker or so, he probably wants something like his business card on the web where he just wants to display his shop, maybe the employees, the products or restaurants will display a menu. But if you are in a business where you use more back-end technology, for instance, be your business, you might have nowadays people working different locations. So you need a chat tool where you can communicate. You want video conferences like we’re doing here. You need digital services beyond the mere web hosting collaboration tools. So that’s why we call this main section of our business web hosting and productivity and this productivity part that I think also evolved mainly maybe in the last 10 or 15 years only with a lot of great tools. Of course, we have the giants again with Microsoft and Google. Google started from the web, but Microsoft now with Office 365, tries to put its office products in the cloud. On the other hand, we have some great open-source solutions we have already for quite a while, OpenOffice, LibreOffice.

Joe - 00: 13:29: ...ownCloud, Nextcloud, whatever it’s called now.

Andreas - 00: 13:32: Nextcloud, exactly, where you can basically set up your own cloud server, either on your PC at home or I have a small RAID system here where I could run my own Nextcloud, or you could go to a hosting company like us, where you have, of course, big Internet connectivity. And I think something related to that, that has also become more and more important is the topic of security and reliability, because for many companies, the Internet now is the foundation of their business. And of course, you do not want to lose your data. You do not want to have a privacy breach apart from legal consequences, to lose all your customers. And that’s something that usually a hosting company can do much better than you can do at home with the small server under your desk.

Joe - 00: 14:16: Yes, yeah, I definitely sympathize with that. I’ve recently gotten into a bunch of home hosting stuff again, but even then I’m like, oh, I don’t want to deal with anything that I have to open my PC up to the Internet.

Andreas - 00: 14:26: I tried once or twice to set up an email server and never again.

Joe - 00: 14:30: So on that point as well, I imagine especially thinking of the little I know about the German market that for small businesses as well, like where they’re keeping their data is also important, right? Like, you know, if they go and use like the Google or the Microsoft versus for their office solution by necessity or their data is going to the US, whereas if they’re hosting in a data center in Germany using Nextcloud, their data stays in the country they expect it to. Is that also a factor in that use case?

Andreas - 00: 14:55: Yes, definitely. I mean, that’s a very strong argument for us. I mean, this Podcast is aiming of course, is at US listeners. So we have our data center in the US. We have our own company in the US, which is completely independent from our European business. So we have a huge data center in Kansas in Lenexa, where we host the data from our American customers. But for all our European customers, the data are stored in Germany, in Spain, in France, the UK as well. And that’s a very strong argument because of course, we all know about the GDPR, which of course on the one hand for companies, sometimes creates a lot of hassle. But on the other hand, it has created a security standard that even has been a blueprint for new laws in the US like in California. So I think that’s the gold standard at the moment. And of course, it means for us as a company that we need to invest strongly to create the security. So for instance, I think you talked to Uwe Erlenwein a couple of days ago, who built our big new data center in Worcester in the UK. I’ve been there last year and it’s just amazing because I also know our older data centers here in Germany or in France. So it’s just incredible how technology has evolved, but also how security standards have evolved. I have this nice picture in my background, which is actually of one of the German data centers.

Joe - 00: 16:03: I was wondering if it was one of the German data centers. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Andreas - 00: 16:08: It’s really an awesome data center picture. But if I remember, I joined the company or group in 2003, so 20 years ago. And if you had a look at our data center there, it wouldn’t have been that nice, but it really was like huge racks of all kinds of computer servers, but also plain PCs, so it was really a mix. And today we really have a very sorted system. Of course, energy saving is something becomes so much more important. Sustainability and as I said, reliability and security. So that’s why we use completely different technology than we did 10 or 20 years ago.

Joe - 00: 16:43: Yeah, which I guess we’ve been talking about the history of web hosting and we’ve mentioned some wild times servers on CEOs’ desks and that kind of thing. As we move towards the present era and nowadays, most people get their websites or web applications online via some kind of cloud provider, right? Like Fira, I think it’s said described as a very different kind of interface kind of experience to the web hosting industry. I mean, people see them as very separate products in a way. But how has that transition to the cloud era influenced the technology and the products that you’re able to offer and I guess the unification of those products?

Andreas - 00: 17:22: That’s a very interesting question. I’m still investigating every now and then where the term cloud actually comes from because I never, never figured out the original source.

Joe - 00: 17:30: Right, yeah, I always have no idea, yeah.

Andreas - 00: 17:33: Because what does cloud mean? I mean, we are basically saying we’ve always been in the cloud business because we’ve been connected to huge big Internet wires with all our services. We’ve been offering email, web hosting. These are cloud services. But I think if you talk about cloud today, probably what you think of is, is really that you have a big mesh of computers that are all connected to each other that you cannot even distinguish anymore between the physical hardware. And I think that’s really one of the big benefits that the cloud enables the customer to easily grow their businesses because they actually, we started this a little bit earlier with what we call cloud servers or virtual cloud servers, which means that customers share space on one piece of machine and they need more CPU units. If they need more RAM, more storage, they could just simply extend this, but still within the realm of one physical machine and with the cloud now, and actually we’ve just started migrating these cloud servers, which were physical machines into our cloud platform, which we also operate. Now these physical edges vanish somehow. And then we can say, well, even if you need to go from 6 to 60 CPU cores, okay, if this one machine doesn’t have enough, we just extend it to the next machine and that provides much more flexibility from a customer perspective. So you’re no longer locked in a certain piece of hardware. And it also of course, completely elixes the hassle of migration. So in the past, if you want to, for instance, if you wanted to migrate from a web hosting package to your own server, you needed to check how easy it was to migrate your data to this whole system. So with us, if you migrated to a managed dedicated server, that was fairly easy because we employed the same technology for these managed servers, like we did for our so-called shared hosting platform. But if you want to go to a root server where you, you have all the rights to operate the server yourself, but you also have the duty. So we, if you have a root server, we don’t have your password anymore. So we can’t do anything as a provider. So you somehow need to see how you get your data on this new machine. But if you do this on one platform, like the cloud, of course, you just don’t have this problem anymore because if you grow, you just add some virtual machines or some CPUs or gigs of storage to it. And that’s very simple. And one benefit that we have at IONOS is that we run our own cloud platform. So again, a nice side story, because we actually this year celebrating our 25th anniversary at IONOS. So that’s 25 years ago was the year when 1&1 Internet bought Schlund+Partner, this company I talked about. And in 2017, we bought a small German company called ProfitBricks. And ProfitBricks actually is a cloud infrastructure company based in Berlin. And it was founded by our former 1&1 CTO, Achim Weiss, who now happens to be our CEO at IONOS. Achim was actually one of the students I mentioned who came to this company.

Joe - 00: 20:20: Really?

Andreas - 00: 20:21: He himself programmed the first version of this cloud platform. Of course, today we have hundreds of programmers working on that. But of course we are very flexible and very independent there. And for us as a hosting company now, what this means is we have a project that we call the Internet factory, which in a wider sense means that we try to, I mean, IONOS is not just one company, but we have something around 10 brands. And what we’re trying now is that we do not invent the wheel three times a day, but we try to use one hosting stack, one email stack. And another side aspect of this is now started trying to migrating as many as possible individual systems onto our own cloud platform. So as I said, our shared hosting platform used to be very diverse with a lot of different computers. So we’re shifting it now to our own cloud, but other companies, we do not have to go to AWS or Google or Microsoft. Because we ran our own infrastructure. We run our infrastructure for European customers in Europe, for American customers in the US so that’s pretty straightforward and we’re very flexible. And I think one other important aspect that we see in the cloud is also that you, from a customer perspective should definitely try to avoid what we call vendor lock-in and that’s something that you face with some of the big hyper scalers that they make it very difficult for you to migrate your data to a different service. And that was always in our DNA that we said, okay, we invite you to come to our service, but also if you’re not happy with it, you’re free to go somewhere else. And for instance, I don’t know, I don’t know that is in the US, but in Europe, we have a big initiative called Gaia X, which is European Cloud Initiative. And the idea of Gaia X is really to ensure this interoperability between different cloud providers and this completely opposition against vendor lock-in is one of the key segments. And another term that is a key part of Gaia X is data sovereignty. So we want that we, our customers control what happens to the data, whether their data are stored and the interesting bit about Gaia X, as I said, it’s a European initiative. So it was started by the German and the French ministry of business. But in the last years, actually all the American hyper scalers joined the initiative because they’ve seen it’s valid. Of course, especially outside of the US, they have a problem because of American surveillance laws. I mean, another anniversary that we have these days is the 10th anniversary of the Snowden revelations, which I think also meant a big change for the whole industry or was very funny because I was just in our US office 10 years ago when the first revelations came out and it was quite interesting. So in Europe, nobody could believe what came out there. And on the other end in the US, at least at that time, nobody was really interested in this, but I think this also has changed in the last years.

Joe - 00: 23:05: Do you think that lack of interest was because it was expected or just the ramifications weren’t...?

Andreas - 00: 23:12: I don’t think anybody really expected that, but I think generally at least 10 years ago, Europe had just a completely different understanding of privacy, data protection than the US. So I think in the US it’s much more common that you’re more open with your data, whereas the Europeans always have been rather restrictive. So I think that was the biggest reason, but still, I think everybody was just shocked about the amount of data that was collected by a government agency. And even in the US, I think that was for the US, for American citizens, the biggest problem that they not only eavesdropped on foreigners, but also on American citizens. And I think that really changed the playing field. And also for us, it meant that we had to rethink how we deal with data. For instance, we always thought, well, why should we encrypt the traffic between our different data centers? But after Snowden, it took us a couple of months and we encrypted all the connections simply for security reasons. So it was just amazing what happened there. But on the other hand, I mean, the cloud won’t go away. And I think nowadays, huge amount of the world business rely on cloud services, even in parts where you just don’t think of it. So we need to find ways to make it as secure and still feasible as possible.

Joe - 00: 24:26: Sure. And you mentioned the new data center in the UK. These things that you’re looking forward to in the future in terms of security and moving things onto the cloud, like how is that shaping up in that new data center? I imagine that data center is getting a lot of the newer advances. Its the testing bed for them, if not just because of how new it is?

Andreas - 00: 24:42: Yes, definitely. But actually it’s really just the starting point. I mean, the status in Worcester is on the outskirts of the city. So there are just some factories around, but not much else. But if you’re thinking about new data centers and there’s actually also a European initiative right now that tries to enforce certain sustainability regulations. So one thing that we will work on is also to use the waste heat from our data centers in the future. And we could do that in Worcester technically, but there’s just nobody who would take the heat at the moment. Right around the corner because the city itself is just too far away. But for instance, in near Frankfurt, we’re planning a new data center. We’re already in very close talks with local energy suppliers on how we can get the waste heat there. And of course the security and availability standards of this new data centers will be the minimum that we aim for in the future.

Joe - 00: 25:31: Which we had a great discussion about and how the tier system and how it came about in that data center was very interesting and unique to me. So I’m excited for the listeners to hear that episode too.

Andreas - 00: 25:40: Yes, definitely. I also love the story that we were told there. But I mean, there’s a standard that used to be common for banks, TR4 or insurance companies. But we think with more and more people going into the cloud, it gets even more important for everybody. But there are also other European standards that we will follow that are even stronger in parts than the TR standards from the Uptime Institute. So that will definitely be the path that we will pursue. Another interesting aspect is that currently 10 or 11 data centers ourselves, but we also have more than 30 data centers where we use co-location sites. So where we rented space in an existing data center from a co-lo provider. And that is also something that we will continue to do. And basically, we’re just looking how much the demand is in a certain market. And if it goes beyond a certain point, then it might make sense economically for us to build our own data center. But one thing that is for sure with the cloud is that we definitely need many, many more so-called availability zones. With the CloudOne, one benefit is because you’re independent from the physical hardware that you can also store your data at different sites, at different locations. But for instance, if you have really a physical catastrophe, you have an earthquake or whatever in one place, you can still save your data at a different location. That is actually something that we started already for our shared hosting services a couple of years ago. We called this dual hosting. So our entire shared hosting platform and our email services and our databases are all mirrored in real time at a separate location. So both in the US and in Europe, in Germany, for instance, the two data centers are like 30 kilometers or 20 miles or so apart. In Kansas, it’s the same. So our main data center is in the Lenexa and the backup site is in Kansas City, which I think is also around 20, 30 miles away. So there you have a certain guarantee that it’s very unlikely that the same catastrophe would happen in similar places. And we’ve done this basically for all services so far, except for dedicated servers, because dedicated server means that one customer has one server. So he or she could still, of course, buy a second server.

Joe - 00: 27:44: Oh, and one on one.

Andreas - 00: 27:45: But that’s of course also something that is much easier with the cloud platform than with physical hardware.

Joe - 00: 27:50: It’s much easier to replicate a Docker container in another, you know, in the system platform than the whole custom server config, right? Yeah.

Andreas - 00: 27:57: Yeah. But Enhani is actually told me that it was quite some work to really get this real-time replication, something that I wouldn’t have thought. And the idea is also within, I think one and a half or two minutes, we are able to switch from one data center site to the other completely if something happens. And that’s of course, especially when you have just regular maintenance. So you can just plan this in advance.

Joe - 00: 28:19: No more putting up holding pages of this website will be offline between these hours, the good old days.

Andreas - 00: 28:25: And again, if you look back in history, this was just 30 years ago. That’s quite amazing. And today I looked up, I think I found a number that there’s an estimate that we have some 200,000 or so web hosting companies across the world. But of course you have very different standards. And I think that’s something as a hosting customer, you just need to take into account. And of course it depends on what kind of data you have. So if you just have your private hobby page as a photographer or for your local club, then you don’t need too much security and maybe you can go to smaller or cheaper hoster. But if you really have relevant data for your business, then you definitely have to take a close look at the security features.

Joe - 00: 29:04: This might be asking a question that’s too deep into that number, but do you think that number, I actually think I have that number here, I think it’s 430,000 hosting companies. Do you think that represents a peak? Where I’m coming from this is because of the existence of the hyperscalers, I would imagine some degree of consolidation and maybe in the past dot-com boom or something like that, maybe there would be more. Do you think we’re at peak hosting or...?

Andreas - 00: 29:29: It’s very difficult to tell. I would say it’s definitely a peak for the big ones, but I haven’t found a number. I don’t know how many companies like from of our size exist, but for instance, even some of our biggest competitors in the States, cease their own shut down their own data centers a couple of years ago and to the Amazon cloud, for instance. And we always said that it’s one of our key USPs that we run our own technology. So of course, with cloud platforms with hyperscalers, it’s much easier for a small hosting company to start their own business as a reseller. So I’m not sure if this number will decline in the short run, but what we’ve definitely seen in the past year, some kind of consolidation. I mean, even IONOS, as I said, we have some 10 brands and our strategy was always in markets that we entered to become number one or number two. And if we couldn’t do this organically, for instance, we often bought the companies like in Poland, home.pl or in the UK, Fasthosts were now part of the IONOS group.

Joe - 00: 30:25: Oh really?

Andreas - 00: 30:26: Yeah.

Joe - 00: 30:27: Turns out I’m an IONOS user.

Andreas - 00: 30:30: Yeah. So that was part of our strategy. And of course, Fasthosts or home.pl or in Spain, Acens, they were huge companies already, but there are so many, many much smaller companies. And on the other hand, from the buying side, of course, you always need to check, can you actually manage to integrate such a company into your own business? Because we’ve seen this also with other companies where you suddenly had 20, 30, 40 companies in a hosting family. But some of these companies really have integration difficulties because the infrastructure is just so diverse and so different between the different companies that you just cannot harmonize it. What I just mentioned about this one-on-one platform or Internet factory approach that we pursue, but even for us, I mean, we’ve been planning this for four or five years now. So it is definitely something in the long run that you have to aim for. And for that, I think you need a certain size. If you don’t have this, there’s a good chance that sooner or later you might get bought by a bigger one.

Joe - 00: 31:25: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we are coming up on time, so I think that’s a good opportunity to take us out. This has been, I’ve had a lot of nostalgia flashbacks and I think it’s only appropriate. Whenever you’re discussing the history of the World Wide Web and the ’90s and 2000s, I always like to hear what people’s favorite weird website was. Because I feel that was like the peak period of the weird web maybe has been normalized a bit. Do you have a particular website from your early days of internet usage that you remember fondly?

Andreas - 00: 31:54: I cannot think of a special website. I have a very funny memory of my second job actually. So my first job was doing PR for a company. And my second job was for this, for UUNET, for this Internet company. And when I applied there, I applied with the homepage I had created for a digital radio association that I worked for.

Joe - 00: 32:11: Amazing.

Andreas - 00: 32:12: So I put this website on a CD-ROM and went to the job interview and the head of marketing who interviewed me, put the CD-ROM with this website I’ve created in. And just said error message, error, error, error.

Joe - 00: 32:23: Oh no.

Andreas - 00: 32:25: And it turned out that I had, I think I had programmed it on Netscape and he was still using Internet Explorer.

Joe - 00: 32:32: Ah, the good old days. Perfect. Yeah.

Andreas - 00: 32:34: Again, this was in 1997, so at a point where you didn’t worry too much about, at least I didn’t, obviously not worry too much about browser compatibility.

Joe - 00: 32:44: And also when the browser manufacturers were doing all kinds of off-standard things to get their features in.

Andreas - 00: 32:48: Definitely. In this job interview this was my weird website, but I still got the job afterwards.

Joe - 00: 32:53: Perfect. I just love just a little bit of like giving someone a website on a CD-ROM. That is perfect. That is lovely.

Andreas - 00: 32:58: I think I still have some of the CD-ROMs somewhere, but I don’t have a CD-ROM player anymore.

Joe - 00: 33:01: No, me either. Well, thank you so much, Andreas. It’s been wonderful. And thank you for joining us today.

Andreas - 00: 33:07: Thanks, Joe.

Outro - 00: 33:08: Beyond The Screen: An IONOS Podcast. To find out more about IONOS and how we’re the go-to source for cutting-edge solutions and web development, visit ionos.com and then make sure to search for IONOS in Apple podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Don’t forget to click subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at IONOS, thanks for listening.