Web hosting is very important for people who want to create their own websites. That is because if you create a website, that will only be available locally at the storage that it was stored in.
For the website to be accessible online, one must get a web hosting company to ‘host’ the website so it will be available for people to access.
But, have you stopped to think about its history and how it all began? Well today, I am going to talk about the brief history of web hosting.
The First Act
The first-ever recorded instance of web hosting goes way back in the mid- ‘90s. Back then, there are still no web hosting companies, per se, and if you want to get your website hosted, you need to go to the different ISPs or internet service providers to get things started.
A lot of experts have predicted that this is predatory and different companies that provide just hosting services to the masses will spring up in the next decade or so.
The Second Act
Then, in the early 2000s, AOL was brave enough to battle against the big ISPs and have created their own line of hosting services. It is much more lenient and provides plenty of different options to the masses. In fact, their deals were so good that people have jumped ship as soon as they’ve heard of AOL.
Then, other hosting companies such as Qwest and Comcast have joined the fray. The good thing about the second act, if you will, is that the prices have dropped considerably.
Normally, you have to pay a premium price to your ISP just to have your website hosted but because of alternative solutions like the one that was provided by AOL, people can now create their own websites without having to pay a huge sum of money.
The Third Act
The final act has paved the way for the web hosting companies that we know today. It all started from cheap web hosting, ASP Web Hosting, and then it evolved to the ‘Big Three’ of hosting and that is the shared hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated Hosting.
The good thing about all of this is that the industry has become livelier than ever. What this means is that as more and more companies are competing against each other, the prices have considerably dropped as a result of it.
Fast forward to today and we are now using cloud web hosting as the norm. Basically, cloud web hosting solves the problem of location constraints, as well as data center breaches, among many others.
The ‘cloud’ as it is called provides a web of different servers that are located at the different parts of the world. All of this means that you will get improved services across the board, as well as increased security, among everything else.
Conclusion
I guess we have to thank AOL for without their courage in creating their own line of web hosting services, we might not enjoy web hosting as we know it today.
