Main features of 2004:  growth of  hosting-services branch, expansion
of  "worms"-viruses and attacks on servers. During the course of  this
year we could have observed the  appearance of  new services on the
market, continuous working out of new technologies and instruments,
perfection  of technosphere, fusion of hosting companies.

IDC research, www.idc.com (November, 2004) shows that  American
businessmen  spent 77.1 millions dollars on IT in 2004. It
corresponds to  growth approximately in 5% in comparison with 2003.
IDC  forecasts that increasing of IT-expense  in the USA in 2005 will remain 7%.

According to Netcraft report, , www.netcraft.com (December, 2004),
about 10,9 millions new domain names appeared during the last year.
The increase of resources, that had been used in commerce, was about
808'722 sites. This increase became possible thanks to reduction of
prices on domain names.

Most active domain buyers were enterprises of small-scale business. It
is forecasted (HostReview.com) that small and middle-sized companies
would be the main clients of hosting-companies in future.

The   Netcraft report, www.netcraft.com, tells us that a new standard
for virtual hosting becomes 1Gb .As  consequence, the prices on Gb
hosting-plan are falling. Providers began to compete  not on the basis
of prices, but on the basis of  given services,traffic, volume of disks' area.

In the security sphere the amount of attacks on the on-line servers
increased especially in banking sphere and on-line trading. The loss
was about 20,1 millions dollars. The problems of protection and
security become the world problems, because it is
supposed(HostReview.com) that in close future about 48% of all
enterprises would use Internet in their work.

The greatest loss in 2004 was done by viruses (Bagle, Doomjuice,
Korgo, MyDoom, Sasser, Witty) and their modifications. The expansion
of this programmes was more faster than in previous years. The loss :
gathering of authentication details ,e-mail addresses, on-line banking
information, removing  the documents from hard disk and sending the
information to swindlers.

MessageLabs (www.messagelabs.com) state that 67.6% of all messages in
Internet are spam. That is why anty-spam and anty-virus protections
remain most important problems for hosters, that  push the hosters  to
active counteraction. The anty-spam alliances are created. In IDC (www.idc.com)
research it is said that the incomes from selling the AntiSpyWare
software would grow from 12 millions dollars in 2003 to 305 millions in 2008.

The    HostReview.com forecasts that after increasing of hosting
services, the further development of technologies would follow. The
main branches in 2005 will be: security,working out of"user friendly"
instruments ,programme providing, appearance of new web-services and
their further expansion.

source www.check-isp.com