RampRate Sourcing Advisors, Strategic Research

I noticed the other day that we'd been receiving announcements of hosts launching "semi-dedicated" hosting services over the last little while (let's say two months) with increasing regularity.

This week saw a few at once. It was mentioned, in passing, in the announcement from Frontpages about DoD compliance. And SSA Host launched a semi-dedicated offering. In the latter case, the emerging service distinction lent a little extra spice to an otherwise somewhat less compelling "small web host adds a new hosting package" story.

The point is that the repetition caught my attention, and got me to wondering about just how new and just how significant the emergence of "semi-dedicated hosting" is.

So according to the obvious "Google test," my ignorance might be something to be embarrassed about. My search for "semi-dedicated" hosting turned up about 135,000 entries. A search for "dedicated hosting," by way of comparison, turns up 2,280,000 entries. But still, 135,000 is a lot of mentions for me to have missed.

I should point out here that I wasn't completely clueless. But my information was pretty limited to that which related directly to the few stories we had done.

In the case of this week's SSA Host story, for instance, the company was using the term "semi-dedicated" to refer to a step between VPS hosting and dedicated hosting. Specifically, one that places a limit on the number of virtual servers per physical server, and guarantees access to a certain amount of system resources.

I sent an email to Dan Garon, whose Press Advance service was responsible for at least three of the recent "company adds semi-dedicated hosting" announcements and half-jokingly asked if "semi-dedicated" was purely a semantic distinction.

He said the exact definition depends on the company; that, for example, another one of his clients had a different technology on the back-end of its semi-dedicated offering than that supporting its VPS hosting.

It seems that semi-dedicated, like "managed hosting" or "green" or many of the other distinctions in the hosting business, is pretty nebulous. It means a lot of different things, depending on whom you ask.

I dug through a few old Web Hosting Talk threads, and it seems like the cynical answer is that semi-dedicated is "glorified shared hosting." If there was a semi-dedicated offering before virtualization became a big part of hosting, then it was probably an effort to answer some of the needs addressed by VPS hosting (or some of the shared hosting shortcomings).

It seems like the spread of VPS hosting is changing the meaning of semi-dedicated somewhat. Now that just about everyone offering dedicated hosting has a VPS offering, maybe "semi-dedicated" is evolving into an effort to address some of the shortcomings of VPS hosting.

I'd love to hear some feedback on this one too. Anyone offer a "semi-dedicated" hosting package? What is it that makes it what it is? What kind of customer is it aimed at?

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