The paradox of Italian hosting companies and their expertise

The Italian hosting industry is populated by large and medium-sized companies that have been a point of reference for professionals, businesses, and individuals for years. Yet, a closer look at the technology stacks of many of these companies reveals surprising gaps: servers that don't support HTTP/3 (QUIC), no trace of Zstandard compression (ZSTD), no HTTP/2 or Brotli on supposedly cutting-edge services, and a complete lack of modern features like Early Hints. These choices translate into more round-trip, increased perceived latency e wasted bandwidth, especially on mobile and congested networks. Product KPIs are also affected: response times TTFB extension taller, LCP worsened, less responsive interactions, with direct impacts on conversions and SEO. Often the problem is not strictly technical, but organizational: we remain anchored to default panels or to “safe” configurations for compatibility with outdated CMS and plugins, postponing the adoption of innovations that would require testing, graduality and observability.

In a world where Google, Cloudflare and international giants are constantly updating their platforms to reduce latency and improve performance, Many Italian hosting companies still have infrastructures that are stuck in place for ten years. The paradox is clear: despite their significant size and numerous clientele, these businesses are unable to keep pace with the evolution of the sector. Why? Because innovation requires clear roadmaps, change management and the ability to measure the benefit of every millisecond saved, while local competition often rewards aggressive price lists and promotions rather than protocol investments. The fear of "breaking something" on legacy environments and the lack of staging environments or canary rollouts push for delay: HTTP/3 remains in the backlog, Brotli and ZSTD are perceived as "nice to have," Early Hints as a detail. This consolidates a defensive posture that protects current operations, but erodes competitive advantage of tomorrow.

The causes are rooted in the history of hosting in Italy, in the entrepreneurial culture that shaped these companies, and in a labor market that makes it extremely difficult to retain the most qualified IT talent. Organizations born and raised with a rationale finance-driven they struggle to give space to technical sponsors internal, training budgets are often symbolic, and the turnover It reduces consistency in infrastructure choices. The strongest profiles prefer freelance work or international operations, leaving skills gaps precisely in the areas that enable qualitative leaps (HTTP/3, Brotli, ZSTD, Early Hints). Without governance that considers these basic ingredients and not optional, adoption remains sporadic and late: a structural limit that explains why many companies, although commercially solid, are technically under-equipped compared to global standards.

The origins: entrepreneurs before technicians

To understand the current situation, we need to go back in time, between 1995 and 2000. In those pioneering years, the Internet in Italy was taking its first steps: dial-up connections, the first business contracts, the birth of city POPs and exchange points that made Milan a central hub. In this context, Caldera Street It became the symbol of the nascent digital ecosystem, a place where telcos, system integrators, and new providers entered the market with structures and models that were still being defined.

Starting a hosting company or provider in that period meant facing very high investmentsData centers, redundant power supplies, air conditioning, expensive racks and servers, high-cost transit connectivity, and still-rare fiber. It wasn't a world for lone geeks or young engineers with a laptop: it required capital, carrier relationships, supply contracts, the ability to negotiate peering, and guaranteed minimum bandwidths. In practice, it was a naturally favorable environment for entrepreneurs and managers more than to pure technicians.

Many of the companies born in those years have survived and evolved, scaling up to become realities with hundreds of employees and thousands of customersBut the DNA remains the same: structures founded and guided by managers and administrators, not by technologists in love with experimentation. This imprinting has impacted processes and priorities: centralized procurement, caution in introducing innovations with operational risks, strong dependence on vendors and their release cycles, and a prevailing focus on economic accounts more than to technical roadmaps.

As a result, organizational practices have been modeled on logics finance-drivenThree-year purchasing plans, a push for standardization to reduce operating costs, and limited tolerance for error and experimentation in production. In the absence of strong technical leadership, infrastructure innovation often became an "on-demand" activity, activated only when commercial urgency dictated it, rather than a core competency cultivated on an ongoing basis.

This approach worked as long as the market was young and the requirements relatively simple. But it also left a mark on corporate culture where technology is seen as a tool to be managed with caution, rather than a competitive advantage to be leveraged. This is where many conservative choices lie, which, years later, explain why many providers born in that era struggle to quickly align with the most modern technical standards.

The rapid evolution of the web and the cultural delay

Since the mid-2000s, the web has undergone a rapid evolution. Sites that in the 90s had just a few thousand monthly visits have transformed into platforms with millions of daily hits, often mobile and with unpredictable peaks. The bar has been raised on everything: response times, availability, security, business continuity, and the ability to handle elastic loads.

La scalability, resilience and performance have become central issues. New compression algorithms, protocols designed to reduce end-to-end latency, aggressive edge caching, and data-sharing techniques have emerged. TLS offload e load balancing advanced, in addition to observability practices (metrics, tracing, structured logs) essential for understanding where milliseconds are being wasted. In this scenario, many companies founded by "administrative" entrepreneurs have begun to struggling to keep up, because the adoption of these innovations requires a chain of coherent technical decisions, continuous investment and the willingness to experiment in a controlled manner.

The reason is simple: those who made (and make) the decisions do not always have the curiosity or the toolbox to evaluate the costs/benefits of innovations such as HTTP / 2 (standardized in 2015) or Brotli (introduced by Google starting in 2013 and then adopted at the browser/CDN level). Without strong technical leadership, the implementation of these technologies comes with years of delay, often only after external pressure (enterprise customers, SEO, performance incidents) and almost never as part of a proactive roadmap.

Complicating the situation are internal processes that are poorly suited to change: long-cycle procurement, dependence on default panels and from vendor releases, lack of environments staging realistic and gradual rollouts (canary, feature flags). With this setting, each protocol or stack upgrade is experienced as an operational risk to be avoided, especially in the presence of Legacy Applications and outdated CMS. The result is a defensive posture: better not to touch anything, even if that means staying on HTTP/1.1, gzip and conservative caching policies, giving up those milliseconds that make the difference today on UX, SEO and conversions.

The role of IT employees and the limits of the Italian model

In the absence of technical founders, innovation falls on the shoulders of sysadmin and devops employees, but often with mandates unbalanced towards operational aspects: putting out fires, maintaining on-call functionality, closing tickets. There's little room for architectural design, performance roadmaps, or controlled experimentation. Without technical sponsorship, any "fundamental" change (new protocols, compression, TLS, edge) becomes extraordinary and therefore rare.

IT figures are still framed by the CCNL like metalworkers: rigid grids, poor distinction between skills, promotions linked more to seniority than to technical impact. Almost everywhere there is a lack of a engineering ladder (junior → senior → staff → principal) with consistent responsibilities and remuneration. The result is a leveling downThose who study, certify, automate, and move company metrics earn little more than those who limit themselves to the contractual minimum.

The comparison with the metalworker highlights the anachronism: the former needs expensive machinery and therefore of the employer who owns them; the IT expert from 2005 onwards, with laptop and connection, can generate value directly for customers. If the company does not exist training budget structured, time dedicated to continuous improvement, policies remote/hybrid and a paid and sustainable availability, the best choose the freelancer or abroad.

The consequences are known: high turnover, islands of excellence surrounded by routine, config drift Between environments, postponed technical decisions, dependence on vendors and panel defaults. Know-how becomes personal, not corporate: one outing can lose months of learning. At that point, the inevitable question arises: why would a capable technician accept €1.500–2.500 per month in an SME, with constraints and on-call often underestimated, when from . can ask €500–1.000 per day working towards objectives, remotely and with greater autonomy?

The consequence: a lack of truly competent figures

This imbalance produces an inevitable consequence: in Italian hosting companies, there are often figures left less motivated and less up-to-dateNot because there's a lack of intelligent or passionate people, but because truly talented people prefer alternative paths where they can grow, choose tools, and measure the impact of their work. Internally, however, you find teams that oversee basic operations but rarely lead. qualitative leaps.

The result can be seen on the field: half-implemented stacks, contradictory configurations between environments, innovations ignored or introduced without criteria. Different versions of the same services coexist in production, non-uniform security policies, incomplete deployment automation. And when a culture of observability (metrics, structured logs, tracing) and SLO clear, problems become intermittent and difficult to diagnose: we chase the symptoms, not the causes.

It is not uncommon for two very distinct souls to coexist within the same company:

• on the one hand the competent “nerd”, which proposes and implements modern solutions, writes runbooks, automates and measures;

• on the other hand, figures who are light years away from the IT world, incapable of managing even basic problems, who fall back on manual “workarounds” and postpone upgrades.

This schizophrenia generates recurring signs:

• Intermittent FeatureHTTP/2 enabled on one cluster, disabled on another; Brotli only on “new” static assets; HTTP/3 postponed “until next quarter.”

• Misaligned configurations: different cipher suites, HSTS present on some vhosts and absent on others, opposing cache policies between similar sites.

• Fragile operation: patching infrequently, maintenance windows that slip, MTTR high for repetitive incidents.

• Hero culture: everything depends on one or two "key" people; in their absence, times are extended and quality declines.

For the end customer this translates into fluctuating servicesOne month everything is fine, the next, gross inefficiencies emerge—latency spikes, increasing time-to-first-byte, backends that saturate during marketing campaigns, caching anomalies that invalidate crucial pages. The perception is of a vendor that doesn't really control its stack, but suffersAnd when the user experience falters, hidden costs follow: increased tickets, loss of trust, declines in conversions and SEO. Without stable and widespread expertise, any improvement remains episodic; without technical continuity, quality does not scale.

Missed Technologies: HTTP/2, Brotli, QUIC, Early Hints

To make the analysis more concrete, it is worth mentioning some of the “missed” technologies and the consequences of not adopting them.

• HTTP / 2 — Standard since 2015: introduces multiplexing (multiple requests on the same connection), HPACK to compress headers and manage priorities more efficiently. This translates to fewer round-trips, pages that start rendering sooner, and less congested TCP queues. Where does it get stuck? Often, theALPN it is not configured, balancers still terminate HTTP / 1.1 oi cipher suites block h2 over TLS. This is the “minimum requirement” for 2025.

• Brotli — Compression algorithm for text assets (HTML/CSS/JS/JSON) more effective than gzip: typically -15/25% of bytes Compared to gzip for the same quality. Two ways to use it: pre-compression of static assets (.br at build time) and dynamic compression for generated responses. This is often avoided for fear of CPU load, but intermediate profiles (levels 4-6) and caching balance the numbers without penalizing them. Not enabling it means heavier pages and longer download times, especially on mobile.

• HTTP/3 (QUIC) — Protocol on UDP faster handshake, connection migration (switch networks without losing the session) and no head-of-line blocking at the transport level. This has a particularly strong impact on unstable networks: it reduces perceived latency in the first hops and improves resilience on 4G/5G and crowded Wi-Fi. Requires edge/balancer support and announcements. Alt-Svc well configured. Without h3, you're giving up precious milliseconds right where it counts: mobile and "distant" geographies.

• Zstandard (ZSTD) — Modern algorithm with excellent compromise compression to CPU ratio. Even when not used as Content-Encoding browser side (non-uniform support), remains strategic for backhaul origin↔CDN, microservices, logs and backups (DB dumps, snapshots, artifacts). Adopting it reduces bandwidth and storage, speeds up internal pipelines and data replication; ignoring it means increased costs and time for everything that isn't "web-facing."

• Early Hints (103) — The server/edge sends a pre-emptive 103 Early Hints Link: rel=preload for critical assets (above-the-fold CSS, fonts, essential JS) while the app prepares the 200 response. The browser immediately starts fetching and LCP often goes down 50-200msIt's important to coordinate your application, CDN/edge, and correct headers; not doing so leaves clients stuck in the pits during TTFB.

These shortcomings are not details: they are competitive advantages lost on speed, UX and SEOIn practice, this means more bytes transferred, more handshakes, layouts that stabilize later, fewer conversions, and poorer engagement—with hidden support and infrastructure costs that increase over time.

Turnover, demotivation and fluctuating quality

The problem is aggravated by the high turnoverCompanies that do not financially (and professionally) recognize the best technicians cyclically lose key resources: a competent sysadmin remains 6–12 months, then moves on to larger companies or consultancy. So the knowledge remains personal, not corporate: when that person leaves, the context, scripts, operational “tricks,” and tuning criteria also leave.

Without a stable foundation, hosting does not develop a technical culture lasting. We live in the present: someone introduces an advanced solution, those who come later don't understand it, deactivate it "out of caution" or let it deteriorate. The absence of runbook updated, documentation minimum and SLO shared produces entropy: divergent environments, patchy patching, improvised incident response procedures.

Typical signs of this drift:

• Config drift Continuous transmission between clusters and data centers; inconsistent versions and policies.

• Hero cultureTwo people know everything; if they're missing, things explode.

• DORA metrics worsening: long lead times, high change failure rate, MTTR growing.

• Recurring incidents (“Groundhog Day”): same bugs, same workarounds, no effective postmortem.

• Organizational debt: ticket backlog, feature release freezes, updates postponed “until later”.

For the customer, this instability translates into fluctuating qualityOne month, brilliant performance, the next, inexplicable crashes; caching that changes behavior, fluctuating latencies, rollouts blocked during peak periods. The perception is of a provider that suffers the infrastructure instead of managing it, with a hidden cost of wasted time, eroded trust and missed opportunities. In the absence of continuity e widespread ownership, quality does not scale and any progress remains episodic.

The gap with companies founded by technicians

Not all companies are like this, however. There is a substantial difference between hosting companies. founded and led by technicians and those directed by administrative entrepreneursThe former treat the infrastructure as a competitive edge; the second ones as a cost center to contain.

In technically-led environments:

• we study and experiment regularly (internal radar tech, RFC, canary tests and feature flags);

• technologies are introduced when they are stable and measurable (latency SLO, error budget, RUM and synthetic test);

• exist runbook, blameless postmortem and shared standards on TLS, caching, CDN, CI/CD;

• procurement is slender and geared towards reducing latency and increasing reliability, not just CAPEX;

• People growth is part of the plan: mentorship, training, certifications, technical career ladder.

In “administrative” companies:

• the roadmap is sales/finance-driven, with long purchasing cycles and dependence on vendor defaults;

• it measures theuptime, rarely the slowness (no performance budget, little observability);

• Upgrades are awesome and feared, so postponed; innovation is reactive, not proactive;

• documentation is poor, standards are inconsistent between environments, quality depends on individual “heroes”;

• training and research are seen as costs, not as margin lever.

This cultural difference determines everything: customer satisfaction (fewer tickets, better resolved), problem response time (lower MTTR, non-recurring accidents), and above all ability to innovate: those led by a strong technical axis bring HTTP/3, Brotli, Early Hints, ZSTD and everything else needed to remain competitive into production sooner—and with less risk.

The customer and the conscious choice

Given all this, what should a customer looking for a reliable hosting company in Italy do? Start with people. Consider who you have in front of you, not just what's on the price list.

• Talk to a technician, not just the sales person. Ask for a call with the person who handles the stack: if he can explain clearly because HTTP/3, Brotli, ZSTD, or Early Hints improve LCP/TTFB, and you're on the right track. If you receive generic or scripted responses, expect a standardized and outdated service.

• Ask testable questions.

  1. “Supported HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 end-to-end, even behind load balancers/CDNs? Do you have ALPN e TLS 1.3 everywhere?"

  2. “Use Brotli in dynamic and pre-compression of assets? Do you have a strategy for ZSTD on backhaul, backups and artifacts?”

  3. “Implemented Early Hints (103) Link: rel=preload on critical assets?”

  4. "Which Latency SLO measured (p95 TTFB/LCP)? Published status page and postmortem?”

  5. “How do you release: canary/blue-green, one-click rollback, realistic staging?”

• Ask for proof, not promises. Un test environment or a pilot migration of a real site, with before/after measurements (RUM or synthetic), is worth more than any brochure. Look at the numbers: p95 TTFB, LCP, INP, build time, and cache purge time.

• Value culture, not just technology. Green signals: Updated runbooks and documentation, transparent changelog, incidents managed with postmortem blameless, public technical roadmap. Red flags: "if it works, don't touch it," rare and extraordinary upgrades, dependence on dashboard defaults, a "hero" who knows everything and the rest of the team is navigating by sight.

• Look at the alignment between incentives and quality. There are SLA with penalties also on performance (not just uptime)? Are there plans capacity for peaks (sales, campaigns, TV)? Is there a technical manager with ownership measured on real-world experience metrics?

The difference is not in the price lists or glossy brochures, but in the technical passion and operational discipline of those who drive the company forward. If you find an enthusiastic, knowledgeable technician on the phone, capable of explaining choices and trade-offs, it's very likely that there's a well-maintained infrastructure behind it. If you get answered by yet another unmotivated employee reciting clichés, prepare yourself for a service that's prone to inertia.

Conclusion

The paradox is clear: many Italian hosting companies are solid on a commercial level but technically backwardThe roots are historical and cultural: entrepreneurs before technicians, contracts that don't value skills, a market that pushes the best towards freelance work or abroad. The result is conservative stacks, late upgrades, and performances that don't hold up to international comparisons.

The good news is that there are different realities, led by technicians with vision and discipline: they adopt HTTP/3, Brotli, ZSTD, Early Hints early; they measure TTFB, LCP, and INP; they invest in CI/CD, observability, and clear SLOs. Here, infrastructure choices are not "optional," but competitive foundation.

The real difference is not the size of the company but the technical culture that guides it. For the customer, this translates into a simple rule: choose who can explain and demonstrate, with numbers and evidence, the reasons for your choices. Always choose hosting where there is an enthusiastic technician behind the phone, not an employee waiting for retirement.