70% of non-english speaking will be online

[Mr Chunder]

According to http://glreach.com/globstats, currently around 50% of the internet is English speaking. In 2003, this figure will fall to 30 %. i.e. 70 % of people will be non-English speaking.

Allowing for the fact that 13.5 million people in the US have English as their second language

So what effect does this have on the US hosting world?

1. Do US hosts want to catch Asian and European markets or is the domestic market sufficiently busy?

2. How will US hosts tackle these markets ? I hear that US hosting companies are aligning themselves with local telecoms operators in countries like the UK (Rackspace). Is this the way forward ?

3. I have not come across many major hosting companies serving non-US markets, so who it serving them ? Who will serve these countries when they grow? Is it a case of each country will have its own hosting market that is different e.g. compare the US with the UK.

I would be interested to hear from hosting companies what they think of this, particularly whether they think it would be worth pursuing foreign markets now and in the future.

[Jaiem]

In a lot of those countries they don't have free (as in open, uncensored) net access. And in many of those countries access to the net and computers in general isn't cheap. So I wonder about those projections.

NTL, in the world economy English is the defacto standard language. If you have a business you want to specifically target a certain country or region then by all means build a local-language version of your site. But I don't think being English only will hurt the vast majority of sites.

[JTY]

Well good thing I chose to study German.


Hmm, maybe I should take up a third language.....

[yourdomainhost]

Probably around 20% of our customer base is non-US, so I'm guessing that US hosting companies are serving much of the international demand for web hosting, along with companies in the UK.

Most of those customers do speak English with varying degrees of fluency. Sales and support correspondence can sometimes become challenging.

Local-language web site versions might be a nice marketing tool to attract more international customers, but I think you'd also have to be prepared to have staff on hand who are fluent in the language to handle sales and support followups.

There are a number of issues unique to international customers that make international hosting a bit more of a challenge than domestic hosting. For those reasons, I don't think we'll aggressively target any foreign markets, though, of course, we're happy to have them when they choose us.

I'm sure there are oppportunities there for hosts who want to gear up to specialize in a particular market.

James

[akashik]

I think if you're going to build a site for a local market that isn't your own language and culture you'd have to do it after a fair amount of research. A while ago e-company had a story about just this topic. The gist of it was, a major company moved into a new area and developed a site with local content as well as a straight translation of their design and company content. As it turned out they'd managed to use some pictures and text that was insulting within the target culture. This wasn't picked up until they started recieving complaints from people viewing the site (ie after it had gone live).

A hasty retreat and a regroup, getting some local people to look through the site fixed the problem before they relaunched again :)

If I had the chance I'd learn Chinese and Indian right now... Two countries with massive populations just starting to go online in a big way...

Greg Moore