It’s only been 20 years since the birth of the internet so the evolution of web hosting in the last 10 could almost be considered its coming of age. There wasn’t even an industry when the when restrictions where lifted in 1991 and the World Wide Web took shape. By 2001 one could only really say that it had been established.
Back then the internet was still dealing with teething problems like e-mail forwarding being banned in Australia because it technically infringed on personal copyright. It was back when Napster was still a big issue and for the first time ever, five US high Schools came online. Versign could only now be used in any language when it made provision for the full set of Unicode. The dot-com bubble had burst and the internet was ready to show what it was truly capable of.
Since then the actual Dollar cost has remained the same. What has changed is what you get for the same price. Web hosting Capacity has increased multiple times and you now get massive amounts of storage space and much greater bandwidth. Newer systems with redundancy have also allowed for almost permanent uptime.
When the internet became a world wide phenomenon it was impractical for anyone who needed website hosting to own their own server. This created a burgeoning new industry because it made so much sense to rent out shared space on large servers. In the beginning this was expensive and complex technology but everyone wanted to invest in it because it seemed that the demand was just growing endlessly.
Technology developed faster than the demand at that time and hardware capacity soon became large and inexpensive. This led to price wars and only the most competitive suppliers could make it through. Smaller Tier 1 providers where bought out and amalgamated into the larger suppliers.
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.
Much of the internet use shifted to different ways of storing content online so services such as YouTube and Flickr where where huge amounts of information such as video and images ended up. This would reduce the demand created by many site at a host because these are normally what uses the most space. By 2009 the free service called Geocities closed down however and this might have been due to the ease of use and lower cost of paid website hosting these days.
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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