A niche web hosting service is targeted to a very small and distinct group of customers (called a niche). Services are modeled around the basic needs of members of that target customer group, and niche web hosts can range from offering hosting services only for certain types of web hosting, or for a certain type of site.
The web hosting industry contains majority of SMEs. For them large investments in marketing may not provide results as per expectations. Still one can find several web hosts in the market who have flourished themselves from a mere reseller hosting system to a thousand servers within a little spare of time. It is quite surprising that the number of hosts selling at low price was zero. They had done nothing but created a niche market for their purpose.
While you may think many niche web hosts would provide their services at discounted rates, since they’re often offering fewer services (such as just image or email hosting), that’s not necessarily the case. While you may only pay $2 – 3 for email or image hosting monthly, you can now find some of the larger, full-service, web hosting companies offering their services for those rates.
Due to the fact that niche web hosts are targeting smaller customer groups, they actually tend to charge more than their general web host competitors. This is because they don’t have the luxury of selling space in bulk to huge groups of general customers. They also sometimes charge increased fees, because they provide specialty tools or templates for their target customers that the general hosts to not.
While a general web host can provide most, if not all, of the services you need, it’s more a matter of preference than anything else. The exception would be if you find a niche web host that is providing specialty tools that you’d like to use in your site or other hosted services. Niche hosting for limited services, such as email or images, can be a good value. That’s especially true if your current general web host limits the number of email accounts you can set up or the space available for images. Consider the benefits a niche host will provide in relation to the cost that you would be charged. If they offer something special that you consider worth the price, then niche hosting might just be for you.