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Expansion Of Website Hosting From A Corporate Angle
The last ten years of website hosting could almost be considered its infancy if the previous ten years where its birth. It has only been 20 years since the World Wide Web was released by CERN using Tim Berner-Lee’s HTML. It took about ten years after that to become fully established in the world.
By 2001 we where still at the stage where Australia was banning forwarding of emails because they technically infringed on personal copyright laws. These where the days of Napster was creating controversy over digital music rights and for the first time in history five High Schools in the US got Internet2 connections. It was the first time that Verisign adopted the full Unicode set, opening it up to use in all languages. These could still be considered the early stages of the internet.
Since then the actual Dollar cost has remained the same. What has changed is what you get for the same price. Web hosting Capacity has increased multiple times and you now get massive amounts of storage space and much greater bandwidth. Newer systems with redundancy have also allowed for almost permanent uptime.
Before there was a large commercial need for website hosting anyone who wanted to post content online had to have their own server. Considering the resources required to host a single page website it soon became clear that this was impractical for everyone to do. Renting out space on a server became the obvious solution and within 10 years shared servers, dedicated servers and co-located servers.
As technology developed servers became cheaper and greater storage capacity was easily available which led to a price war and only the fittest companies would survive. By 2001 there was actually an excess of capacity and the need for website hosting was leveling out. Smaller hosting companies where bought out and only a few larger ones where left.
At this stage the most common modem was still a 56K dial up and there are only about 500 million internet users worldwide so bandwidth restrictions are not really an issue. In order for servers to really use their capacity it would be necessary for connections to be much faster. As the connection speed increased there was a greater demand for content as people would spend more time online.
Much of the internet use shifted to different ways of storing content online so services such as YouTube and Flickr where where huge amounts of information such as video and images ended up. This would reduce the demand created by many site at a host because these are normally what uses the most space. By 2009 the free service called Geocities closed down however and this might have been due to the ease of use and lower cost of paid website hosting these days.
Today there is almost endless capacity, or at least more than most people could use. What set’s website hosting companies apart is simply the service and the options they provide. The latest innovation is in cloud hosting and although there are security concerns it does provide the ultimate in flexibility as well as scalability and the best performance.
