Web Hosting 101
Many people may not be remember life without the internet but it was only back in 1990 when web hosting came to life as this was when Tim Berners Lee developed the initial program for the web. This was followed by a variety of programs and soon companies were developing web hosting services of their own and this has created the modern environment where there is a huge level of growth in hosting web sites. Web hosting may seem like a familiar term but before 1991, this term was unheard of, which means so was the internet. If you would like to study the growth of the internet, a great place for research is the internet itself which shows you how far it has developed. Recent decades has seen an explosion in technological advances and after the radio and television products, the internet is probably the next biggest. Bear in mind there are over 50 million websites on the internet and think what you would look at if you didn’t have websites to view.
A look back at earlier days
It was back in August of 1962 when J.C.R. Licklider of MIT introduced the ideas that went onto form the internet. Licklider created a lot of articles regarding the future and one of his main topics was about the Galactic Network which was based on millions of computers linked to each other providing information of many people to benefit from. The next step for Licklider was to take a trip to the Advanced Research Project Agency [ARPA] which was the computer science project offered at MIT. When there, Licklider attempted to wow and detail the benefits that would come from networking and linking computers together.
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.
Prior to this, there had been publications of various TCP/IP related features which enabled networking without even knowing the potential that this protocol had for the future. In the past couple of years, most of the discussions at the IETF meeting gave a lot of importance to topics related to the TCP/IP protocols and the manner in which it could be expanded. For this purpose, some tools were required, and discussion was also done on its features. Some basic products meant for networking were developed for this purpose, which provided an internet connection. These were the limits to which commercial efforts went. But when the users of the internet grew substantially, it became an essential service and the internet captured the imagination of the common man. Technology developments had a big role to play in making this possible.
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.
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.
