Small and Medium Enterprise Web Hosts
While small and medium-sized enterprises already account for a significant portion of the Web hosting market, experts say the SME hosting customer base has only just begun to realize its potential. Service providers are only now reaching the end of the early-adopter market, and have barely begun to tap into the enormous mass market that lies beyond.
Though the size and potential of that mass market is a matter of some speculation, most agree it is enormous. The specific numbers vary depending on the source, says Shirley Siluk Gregory, senior analyst at research organization The ebi Group, but recent reports have placed the number of small businesses in the US at five-and-a-half million. "Our estimates," says Gregory, "in our HSP Outlook report, said that anywhere from 37 to 50 percent of those already operate a Web site. And that will change, depending on how you define a small business and how you define a Web site. You have to remember that a lot of those Web sites are anything but fully-functional."
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