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?
A look back at earlier days
It was in 1962 and through the eyes of J.C.R. Licklider that the genesis of the internet began at MIT. A whole host of articles were created by Licklider which shared his ideas about the Galactic Network which described computers being linked to each other, providing information resources that everyone could share. The Computer Science program at MIT was also known as the Advanced Research Project Agency [ARPA] and this was where Licklider was scheduled to visit. Whilst there, he would tell of his ideas and try to convince people there was a demand for this form of networking computers.
It is always interesting to be aware of the political background at the time and ARPA was developed at the same time as NASA. After the Russians launched Sputnik, their artificial satellite, there was a huge need for the Americans to keep pace with their Soviet counterparts. The first form of computer networking came through packet switching, which enabled data to be transferred as tiny packages through telephone lines which was a huge improvement over the previous form of utilizing circuit lines that were solid. A great benefit was that this connection was busy only when information was passing through and this helped to free up room to allow the computer to undertake additional tasks. Paul Baran invented the Hot Potato network design when he was trying to create a package that would ensure telecommunication data to be passed in the event of a nuclear war. This design was to play a major role in the development of the internet.
Following on from this, was the process that allowed computers to talk back and forth to each other and there is no doubt that 1991 was a pivotal year for the development of the internet. It was already around before then but this year was the base for the internet to grow into much bigger things. A major step came when the National Science Foundation] NSF] made a judgment that the web restrictions that prohibited commercial activity should be lifted. This changed everything and resulted in much more scope and possibilities for the internet. What is now known as e-commerce was born and a whole host of companies who foresaw the benefits the internet would bring came rushing in behind. It was at the tail-end of 1991 that WWW or the World Wide Web started to be used by CERN and it incorporated Hyper Text Markup Language [HTML.] HTML was developed by Tim Berner Lee and it was linked to the website address or it’s Uniform Resource Locator [URL.] That’s a whole of abbreviations to learn but it is now synonymous with the location of addresses for websites and the World Wide Web.
Although its early use may have been mainly benefited by computer and technologically minded people, the internet was soon to spread to the general public, greatly assisted by its simplistic methods. Of course, as the internet grew, complexities followed but it was offering many new benefits and the business world was not slow in predicting a positive future nor was it slow in cashing in on it.
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.
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.
Before this development, networking had been undertaken through a number of TCP/IP features but the people at the time had no concept of the future of the internet. Recent years much debate and praise to issues stemming from TCP/ICP protocols and its development, with much of the praise coming from the IETF meeting. More tools were required to continue the progress and further debate and conjecture about how best to facilitate expansion was discussed. An internet connection was vital and a number of easy to use products were created with this aim in mind. At times it seemed as though there were restrictions on how far the commercial activity would go but as numbers of people using the internet grew, the importance of the service developed. The more the internet became integral to everyday life, the more developments and technological change had to develop to make it all possible.
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.
