| By :
Dirik Hameed
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. The biggest thing in webhosting that has changed since then is that you can get multiple times more capacity for just about the same price now. We have gone from single to at least double figures for bandwidth and storage space has gone from being measured in Megs to Gigs. Uptime has only ever been compared in fractions of a percentage but it has also got to the point where it is almost permanent. 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. The technology developed faster than the demand however and by 2001 there was almost an oversupply of capacity. This led to a price war and smaller operators ended up getting bought out by larger companies. With the advent of newer technology it has made is possible for operators of any size to be part of the system again. Growth would remain slow for a while. The average modem was still a dial up with a 56K speed which meant that the demand on servers was limited. Since then the number of internet users has quadrupled so it is more useful to be prepared for high demand these days. With increased usage and bigger websites there is finally a demand for the capacity on offer. Free services such as social networking and YouTube changed the way a lot of content was stored online. It also increased the amount of time people spent online and this led to increased sharing. Websites where also able to be far more complex which could then make used of the extended capacity available. As time went by the way we used free service changed and by 2009 we see the end of Geocities. This in a way marks the end of Web1.0. 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.
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