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

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.

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.

Internet no longer remained confined to the computer technicians, but with additions being constantly made to its format, it became increasingly used by the common man due to ease of understandability. But the complexities of the internet grew as well. The business sector forecasted that internet would have a great future, and they capitalized on it.

As the internet was starting out, it was expensive to host a web site but this is no longer the case but although it has gotten cheaper, it is still very difficult for some to use. There is no doubt that renting server space has now become a major business and it is true that there are as many firms offering services to host web sites as there are providing internet access. As computers have evolves, so has the internet. Equally, the business world has developed at a greater pace with the addition of web host providers and computers.

Statistics claim that today there are 35,000+ businesses which host 100+ websites on their server. Due to the increase in competition, the industry is seeing a huge growth. In fact, as you read this, 100’s of companies have already been added to the list. The first program for the WWW was of a hypertext editor which was executed in the NeXT machine. A line mode browser was used at that point of time, designed by Nicola Pellow, a student. The server published the specifications of HTTP, UDI and HTML in order to facilitate discussion by people who research on the given topic. For accessing the internet, browsers like Cello, Mosaic, etc. were introduced to enable clients to work on machines other than NeXT. 1994 marked the beginning of the World Wide Consortium, which is a landmark event where companies formed together to create common protocols for the Web, and then began a world 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.

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 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.

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