MJ: As chief technology officer of Fasthosts, I’m responsible for the operational running of the hosting platform and software and systems development. Web hosts are effectively the homes of the internet, and the performance of web hosts determine a good amount of web surfers’ user experience. Web hosts themselves need to continually increase their connectivity, and work to maintain their uptime.

Web hosts measure website traffic and email traffic, and make adjustments accordingly to their routers and servers in order to maximise input and output. Fasthosts manages hundreds of thousands of active websites and millions of emails a month, so we are constantly fine-tuning our systems according to technical demands.

MJ: While it’s difficult to measure the UK slice of the web, the few indicators we do have, such as Netcraft’s web server survey and Nominet’s domain registration figures, suggest that UK growth remains at a steady rate. As a UK provider, we currently view demand for web space and bandwidth as very healthy. The maturing of the market has meant that today’s typical hosting customer is using a larger amount of web space and traffic.

MJ: There doesn’t appear to be any creaking or straining at present. However, the web’s infrastructure comprises of a vast array of networks that connect a surfer to a web server. Web hosts have the challenge of staying apace of technical demands and ensuring that websites remain well-connected. The speed and reliability of websites will depend upon how wellconnected web hosts are to changing internet protocol networks. If a host does not maintain the best possible connections to interconnection facilities and peering platforms, its websites will suffer.

As the web grows, providers optimise their networks and backbone routers to maximise on redundancy, reliability and security. Investments in ring networks and connections mean that hosts today can enjoy connections of single or even multiple ten-Gigabit Ethernet (ten GbE) channels. Such co-ordinated growth should ensure that web networks increase alongside the growth of demand.

MJ: The internet can be called ‘expert’ in the sense that there are systems in place to ensure that its infrastructure develops sufficiently. However, these rely on network providers making investments and are in no way automatic.

For the user today, perhaps the biggest challenge is the transfer of data which can often be a cumbersome process. The future will bring unprecedented levels of business and personal data and so will drive the production of affordable connectivity. With the ability to access and transfer higher volumes of data from a centralised hosted space, users will be free to use more of the web.

MJ: Our searching of the web is likely to be transformed. In the future, the sheer amount of data online could risk choking the web user. Greater use of meta-data and meta-search engines will lead to more virtual databases being used. This more powerful type of search engine synthesises requests and is far more efficient for the user.

Wider use of rich media, such as video and interactive services within websites, will mean that users will soon become reliant on high-speed connections and intuitive navigation tools to make the most of the internet.

MJ: Modifications in search will inevitably impact the way in which websites need to be hosted. The proliferation of audio and video knowledge on the web will require hosting to be ever more powerful and robust. More powerful search engines will greatly enhance our capacity to capture, store, analyse and manage data from across the web, but this may indeed require hosts to enhance the availability and structure of the data they store.

MJ: Web 2.0 is defined by the personal user, by their participation and by the collective intelligence that collaborative platforms generate.

The biggest implication for hosting is the increase in the quantity of data that will be centralised. Web 3.0 will build on this by developing innovative portal services on a number of platforms like mobile phones, set-top boxes and game consoles. This will require web hosts to advance their networks and the hosting products they offer.