The History of Web Hosting

June 3, 2011 | Author: William MacMahon | Posted in Hardware

Web hosting began in the year 1990 when Tim Berners Lee wrote the first web program. Many other programs were written thereafter, and many companies came up with their own web hosting service which made possible the present scenario, where there is tremendous growth in the arena of web hosting. It is also interesting to note that prior to 1991, nothing called web hosting was known to the humankind. This invariably means that there was no concept of the internet in 1991 as well. But if you want to find out the history of web hosting today, you would have to take recourse of the internet. Such has been its development! Technology has developed a lot, and the internet is the biggest development after the radio and the television. It is again worthwhile to note that internet is powered by more than 50 million websites, which form its core base. Ask yourself, what would you do online if there were no websites at all?

How it all started.

The concept of the Internet had been brought forward in August, 1962, by J.C.R. Licklider, at the MIT. He wrote many articles where he saw a vision of the concept of Galactic Network, which connected millions of computers with each other, where the resources were common for everybody to use. Licklider was then supposed to visit the Advanced Research Project Agency [ARPA], which was the program of Computer Science at MIT. He would try to impress the successors of the need to develop the concept of computer networking.

An interesting point to mention here is that the militants developed the ARPA at the same time as they developed NASA, in order to find a manner in which the United States could make pace to catch up with USSR in the space arena after launching Sputnik, an artificial Russian satellite. Computer networking initially meant packet switching, based on the concept that it would be possible to send data through telephone lines as small packages rather than using the solid lines of circuit. In this manner, the connections would be used only when information was traveling through it, which would free up space on the system for the computer to perform more activities. Later on, while working on a project for allowing the telecommunication system to even survive a nuclear war, Paul Baran would come up with the Hot Potato networking design, which would lay the base for what would come to be known as the internet.

The next step was to enable the computers to communicate with each other. 1991 was a landmark year for the foundation of internet. The internet was an entity already, for sure, but a stage was set for the internet to get bigger. It began when the NSF [National Science Foundation] decided that it was high time the commercial restrictions on the web were lifted. This opened up a world of possibilities for the internet. It gave birth to E-Commerce, and brought with it many companies who foresaw that web hosting will be a booming industry in the years to come. Late in 1991, people at CERN introduced WWW [World Wide Web] to the world, which incorporated the HTML [Hyper Text Markup Language], developed by Tim Berner Lee, which used specifications for the website URL [Uniform Resource Locator]. Besides providing the world a host of abbreviations for various terms, it became the most common standard for location of website addresses.

As the internet expanded, its user base grew and it was no longer the preserve of computer literate people and technically minded folk. New features made it easier for the common person to use the system but equally,there was a drive to push technology further, so the setup became more complex in other ways. It was predicted by the business sector that the internet would boom and be a future hit and many organizations attempted to capitalize on this.

As the internet was starting out, it was expensive to host a web site but this is no longer the case but although it has gotten cheaper, it is still very difficult for some to use. There is no doubt that renting server space has now become a major business and it is true that there are as many firms offering services to host web sites as there are providing internet access. As computers have evolves, so has the internet. Equally, the business world has developed at a greater pace with the addition of web host providers and computers.

There are statistics available to state that more than 35,000 businesses host over 100 websites on the server they own. It is easy to see that there is huge growth with this level of competition, and in the time this article has been read, there have been probably hundreds more companies who have joined up also. The NeXt machine had the glory of having the first WWW program written for it and it was a hypertext editor that provided it. A student by the name of Nicola Pellow created a line mode browser and this was to help others researching a specific topic to have somewhere to discuss. Listings of UDI, HTML and HTTP were provided by the server to enable this discussion. For machines that were not NeXt, browsers such as Cello or Mosaic were created to enable other users to access the internet. The World Wide Consortium came into being in 1994 when a number of companies joined to create a system of shared protocols that could be used on the Web and this moment can be seen as the true birth of the web.

Prior to this, there had been publications of various TCP/IP related features which enabled networking without even knowing the potential that this protocol had for the future. In the past couple of years, most of the discussions at the IETF meeting gave a lot of importance to topics related to the TCP/IP protocols and the manner in which it could be expanded. For this purpose, some tools were required, and discussion was also done on its features. Some basic products meant for networking were developed for this purpose, which provided an internet connection. These were the limits to which commercial efforts went. But when the users of the internet grew substantially, it became an essential service and the internet captured the imagination of the common man. Technology developments had a big role to play in making this possible.

This is why many Information Technology firms and trend setters, such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and many more have got into the internet industry and provides services, products and tools to better the service of web applications. People dont want to think about too much on the internet, they mainly just want to get to a specific site and this is the way that web servers have been created to perform.

In order to facilitate this growing demand, there has been a need for hardware manufacturers to manufacture bigger and better working servers to continue the rate of growth of the web hosting industry. The internet and how it works has changed dramatically over time and it is now viewed as a Peer to Peer [P2P] network, which has developed from the previous Personal Computer [PS] and client server states. There are a multitude of features that can be undertaken on the internet and they include distributing data and information, contacting others by email, logging remotely and much more. If you can think of it, it has probably already been done, yet there are still many more transformations to come from the internet. Concepts like internet telephony and television are very recent additions and who can say what form the internet will be in when it comes to a decade or so from now.

About the author: Tired of hyped up web hosting companies that don’t deliver? Compare uptime ratings and read real user reviews for the best hosting companies at www.webhostingmadness.com.

Author: William MacMahon

This author has published 40 articles so far. More info about the author is coming soon.

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