Web Hosting: A Historic Perspective

The history of we hosting started in 1990 when the first web program was written by Tim Berners Lee. A great number of programs followed with companies creating their own form of services to offer web hosting which has resulted in the modern scenario. Today there is a huge increase in the web hosting industry. Although the term web hosting is very common today, it meant nothing before 1991 and similarly, there no ideas of the internet at that time either. However, to get the best from modern web hosting it can be worthwhile to research the development of the internet and it has developed a lot. Aside from television and radio, the internet is probably the largest technological development and there are over 50 million websites, making up the platform of the modern internet. If you did not have websites to visit, what would you do online?

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.

A fact that may be of interest to many people comes from the development of the ARPA which was devised by militants in the same era that NASA was constructed. With the Cold War scares of what the USSR were going to do in the space race, there was a need for the USA to keep up with them and counter their launching of Sputnik, the artificial satellite put into space by the Russians. The first concept of computer networking was based on packet switching, and this allowed data to be sent via telephone lines in a tiny bundle as opposed to sending it via bulky circuit lines. A benefit of this was that the connection was only being used when data was physically being sent through it and this allowed the computer to undertake more actions. Further developments came when Paul Baran was constructing a project to ensure the telecommunication system would exist after a nuclear war and made the Hot Potato network design. This is what was set the cornerstone for what would later become the internet.

The progress of the internet continued apace and was benefited by computers being able to communicate with each other. It is fair to say that 1991 is a key year in internet history and although it was already around, its development was going to get much bigger. The National Science Foundation [NSF] played a massive role in this when they judged that there should be a lowering of the commercial limits placed on the web. This changed the internet and brought many new possibilities and advantages. E-commerce developed from this point and the rush of companies looking to be ready for the boom period was signing up in droves. It was near the end of 1991 when staff at CERN brought the WWW, World Wide Web to users and this system used HTML, otherwise known as Hyper Text Markup Language. HMTL was also the brainchild of Tim Berner Lee and he used the same technique to create URL, the uniform resource locator. That may just seem like the last in a long line of abbreviations but it has quickly became the frequently used term for finding the addresses of websites.

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.

Web hosting was pretty expensive in the earlier days, but now it is quite reasonable, though a bit complex for a common man to decipher. The beginning saw big companies renting space on their server, and this has become a business now. The number of companies offering web hosting services is equal to the number of companies providing access to the internet. The internet has evolved with the evolution in computers. The way business is conducted has seen a drastic change with the introduction of computers and web hosting facilities.

Today there are over 35,000 businesses that play host to in excess of 100 websites through their server. This industry is growing due to healthy competition and in the time it takes you to read this article, there are probably hundreds more companies who have joined up. The WWW has had many programs but the first was a hypertext editor which made its debut in the NeXt machine. This progress was brought about by Nicola Pellow, a student, who brought about the line mode browser. Its main purpose was to provide a platform for discussion by people looking to research certain areas and this was made possible by the server publishing details of HTTP, HTML and UDI. Further progress was enabled when internet browsers such as Mosaic or Cello were created which allowed people to operate and search on machines which were not the NeXT model. The next notable landmark year was 1994 which heralded the start of the World Wide Consortium when firms came together to develop similar practices for web usage and which became the basis for a world of web sites.

Earlier versions had seen the use of a number of TCP/IP features which allowed users to network but at the time, it was not known what the potential for this setup was going to be. Recent IETF meetings have viewed these TCP/IET protocols with more praise and acceptance than previously and have acknowledged the advances since then. To enable this expansion, tools were needed and how best to enable this was the basis for much debate. As networking was a key issue, products to enable this were developed and this allowed users to be able to connect to the internet. At the time, this was the edge of what commercial possibilities stretched to but as more people got online in huge numbers, it was vital for people to have this service and the internet easily captured the interest of many ordinary people. The advances made by the internet were down to huge technological improvements.

Some of the Information Technology major companies like IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, etc. are getting into the market of the internet, and many tools, products, etc. have been developed to improve web applications. Web servers are made available in such a way that they offer the people access to the webpage that they require, and many other features which may help them as well.

In addition to tools and services, there has been a requirement for the makers of hardware to improve the size of their power servers to ensure the growth of the web hosting industry continues. There is no doubt that the way the internet is used today is drastically different from its origins. It may have started off with Personal Computers onto the client server and then to the Peer to Peer [P2P] type network. There have been abundance of different features that came to life thanks to the internet and these include passing of information and data, communicating via email, being able to log on remotely and many other useful functions. It seems that if you want it you can have it but also bear in mind that the internet is still rapidly developing. With television and videos on the internet being the latest features, it may be hard to predict what is coming next on the internet but whatever it is, it should be interesting.

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