Originally Posted by SweetT

I think bandwidth will continue to drop but not by as large of a margin and not as quickly. Gone are the days that a hosting company can go to its provider and get a few dollars knocked off of their per meg price...soon the negotiations will be for quarters and dimes....but yes, it will probably still drop.

There are two VERY IMPORTANT components to a hosting bill that are not going down, however...in fact, they are going up. Employees continue to get more expensive. Benefits are going up, taxes are going up and all in all employees are driving prices up. The other component is DATA CENTER SPACE. Data Center space is about to explode. I know of at least 3 very well established hosting companies that frequent this board who are sweating because they have recently learned that their data center rent is going to double, triple, or quadruple in 2009. The cost to power the DC is going up, the cost to cool it is going up, the cost of redundancies is going up. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that by the end of 2009 demand will outpace supply in the data center world (yes, world, not US)....who knows what happens when there is more demand than supply? Yes, prices sky rocket.

So, to answer your original question....yes, I think bandwidth will get to less than $1/mbps, in fact, I think you are going to find it being FREE with the lease of cabinet space...which is going to continue to increase in cost over the next 2 years.

Of course, this is just my $.02. What do I know? I am an idiot.


--T