Host with the most: UUNet data centers want to give your Web site a home

MCI WorldCom's UUNet division plans to beef up its Web hosting capacity by building seven new Internet hosting centers in the U.S. and expanding the three it currently operates.

The company will construct new UUhost data centers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and another city yet to be named and will enlarge the centers it now operates in Columbus, Ohio; San Jose; and Washington.

The projected construction will cost about $100 million and should be complete by first quarter 2000, said Mitch Ferro, director of product management for hosting and e-commerce with UUNet. "After that, we will look to expand our overseas data center network into Asia - most likely Japan and Hong Kong." UUNet currently operates five international centers in Brussels, Belgium; Dortmund, Germany; London and Manchester, England; and Paris.

The service provider's buildout is intended to capture more business from high-bandwidth, high-revenue Web content providers and application service providers (ASPs). Many want facilities-based Web hosts, Ferro said, but they also want the assurance of working with a data center in their own back yard.

"The target audience for ASP applications is [business users], and to reach them, you need an access network," said Greg Howard, an analyst for The HTRC Group. "UUNet has a significant access network and a lot of service provider customers. They can offer a real performance enhancement all the way down to the end user vs. someone who only has a hosted network and some interconnection agreements."

UUhost can offer end-to-end connectivity to 70,000 business customers linked to its global network, Ferro said.

UUhost now gets 65% to 70% of its revenue from Web hosting on shared or dedicated servers, relatively basic e-commerce functions and hosting groupware such as Lotus Domino for intranets and extranets. The carrier hopes that its new hosting capacity will shift the revenue stream to more complex enterprise-class managed services.