Web Hosting 101
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 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.
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.
Hosting a web site was not cheap in the formative years but the price is now affordable, even if understanding everything may be a bit tricky for some users. One of the business developments has come about by firms renting server space and this has grown from humble beginnings. Nowadays, it is fair to say that there are a similar number of companies offering internet access as there are providing services for hosting web sites. As computer and technology has grown, so has the internet. Business too has dramatically changed and more use of computers and web hosts has brought about these changes.
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.
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 order to facilitate this growing demand, there has been a need for hardware manufacturers to manufacture bigger and better working servers to continue the rate of growth of the web hosting industry. The internet and how it works has changed dramatically over time and it is now viewed as a Peer to Peer [P2P] network, which has developed from the previous Personal Computer [PS] and client server states. There are a multitude of features that can be undertaken on the internet and they include distributing data and information, contacting others by email, logging remotely and much more. If you can think of it, it has probably already been done, yet there are still many more transformations to come from the internet. Concepts like internet telephony and television are very recent additions and who can say what form the internet will be in when it comes to a decade or so from now.
About the author: Tired of hyped up web hosting companies that don’t deliver? Compare uptime ratings and read real user reviews for the best hosting companies at www.webhostingmadness.com.
Popularity: 1% [?]
