The History of Web Hosting
Web hosting is considered a new industry. In the past, there was no need for web hosting until the birth of the internet and still, no great need for web hosting until individuals and companies started to launch their own websites, that’s when the web hosting industry boomed!
In this article, we’ll briefly talk about web hosting history to let you know more about this interesting industry.
NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network) and WWW
The decision that started the web hosting industry was the National Science Foundation decision to lift commercial restrictions on the web and allowed commercial traffic to use its (NSFNET) internet network in 1991 resulting in compliance with (NSFNET)’s use policy for profit-companies to have access to the network, which was previously only used for education and research.
That change also coincided with the launch of the WWW – World Wide Web in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues. Also, in 1995 Berners-Lee’s WWW model was adopted as the preferred method to access the Internet.
All of that resulted in an increase in the number of Internet users which increased the commercial usage of the Internet, which in return created the web hosting industry because any company or individual that needs to launch a website needs a server or host to host his website.
In 1995, there were 16 million internet users around the world with a percentage of 0.4% of the total population of the world, and by 2015, this figure reached 3.18 billion with a percentage of 43.4% of the total population of the world.
The First Shape of Web Hosting – Geo-Cities
The first shape of web hosting was something called Geo-Cities which started in 1994 and was bought by Yahoo in 1999. Geo-Cities allowed users to upload and host web pages with simple content sorted by virtual ‘cities’ that had relevance to the page’s content.
Shared Hosting from the Beginning
According to research by Pingdom, in 1998, the average cost of a shared hosting package which includes 150MB of storage was around $16.30 per month and dropped to $12.95 by 2008. At this time, shared hosting was the dominant hosting type in the market.
The “.Com” Bubble Burst … and The Start of the Cloud
The burst of the “.com” bubble at the start of the 20th century allowed the web hosting industry and the technology industry, in general, to reshape as we see it today, so the companies who stood out had to modernize and find out more efficient IT architectures to keep up that reshaping of the industry and market needs.
This is considered as the Start of The Cloud as we know it today…
From 2007 and beyond, the cloud shined and had big popularity among small businesses and enterprises in 2009, because of its low prices and huge scalability. Some organizations were having concerns about cloud security, but all of these concerns disappeared by the birth of the Private Cloud, which allowed users to achieve the same level of scalability but with full control of their own hardware.
By 2011, we started to see the benefits of the public cloud such as the ease of access and sharing which led to the integration between the components of the private cloud and the public cloud to finally create the hybrid cloud.
Looking at the Future
The web hosting industry will continue to grow and develop over the coming years, it’s first 25 years have taught us that there is a consistency in the foundation of core services, but the methods and technologies that deliver the services of web hosting are what change regularly by inventing new technologies.
