Evolution Of Website Hosting From A Corporate Perspective
It’s only been 20 years since the birth of the internet so the evolution of web hosting in the last 10 could almost be considered its coming of age. There wasn’t even an industry when the when restrictions where lifted in 1991 and the World Wide Web took shape. By 2001 one could only really say that it had been established.
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.
Technology developed faster than the demand at that time and hardware capacity soon became large and inexpensive. This led to price wars and only the most competitive suppliers could make it through. Smaller Tier 1 providers where bought out and amalgamated into the larger suppliers.
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.
Apart from the fact that there is much greater capacity available these days the other difference is that there are more options available. You can go direct or you can use a reseller. If you want to manage your own website hosting there are also various options. The biggest advance so far is probably cloud hosting, which although it is said to be less secure offers a number of advantages.