Despite falling prices for high-speed bandwidth and wireless service, telecom budgets keep growing because of increased usage and new services such as virtual private networks, voice-mail storage and Web hosting.

FORBES: Dialing for Dollars

Open source software such as Apache Web server and the Linux server operating system have become popular systems to run not only on network servers, but also on server appliances (servers dedicated to single tasks such as e-mail and Web site hosting).

CNN: Red Hat to support "all things open source"

Critical Path hosts e-mail for companies, and hosting now brings in 25% of its revenue.

FORBES: Top Stories

Critical Path hosts e-mail for companies, and hosting now poses 25% of revenue and could grow to 75% in five years.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Your domain can't have a Web or e-mail presence unless it's hosted--though your registrar may provide some hosting services for a Web presence and e-mail account at a reasonable cost (or gratis).

CNN: How to get your own domain name

Paul, Minnesota, man has three online banking accounts, a PayPal account, domain names, Web-hosting accounts, multiple e-mail addresses and many social-networking accounts.

CNN: New services promise online life after death

"As an 2018 ambassador, I felt it would be hypocritical to continue earning a salary writing for the Mail on Sunday when they've clearly damaged our chances of hosting the 2018 World Cup, " he told BBC Radio 4.

BBC: Lord Coe confident of successful 2018 World Cup bid

If you want a Web presence but don't care about e-mail boxes and don't have much of a budget, there's no shortage of free domain hosting services.

CNN: How to get your own domain name

Not surprisingly given Microsoft's big cloud push, the emphasis with the upgrade is on improving how well the software scales for internet hosting -- the company wants one common backbone that can handle as little as a small e-mail server to large-scale Azure deployments and virtualization.

ENGADGET: Microsoft delivers Windows Server 2012, puts the enterprise on cloud 8