by Matt Hedges
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?
A look back at earlier days
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 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.
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.
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.
The hardware manufacturers have also built power servers to catalyze the growth of the industry of web hosting. There has been a phenomenal change in how the internet is used. It has undergone a drastic change from the PC’s [Personal Computers] to the client server to the P2P [Peer to Peer] network. Various features that have been made possible by the internet include sharing of data and information, emailing, remote logging and a host of other features. You name it, you have it! However, keep in mind that this transformation is still in progress. Internet television and internet telephony are other features which have been developed of late. It will be very difficult to say to what level the internet will have reached after, say, a decade!