In the dark days of the pre-internet age, there was no such thing as a web server. What we take for granted today – simply subscribing to a hosting provider, buying a domain name and setting up a website – was a foreign concept before 1991, the year when the World Wide Web was introduced to mankind. Since then, the technology involved in web hosting has grown in leaps and bounds and as the needs of sharing information have evolved, so too has the way we host our websites.

Let us take a look at an overview of how far we have come since those dark days:

The Personal Computer or Workstation

During the first few years of web hosting, sites were hosted on nothing more than personal computers. They were pretty hard to keep secure: people accidentally deleted files or stopped services (mainly because they did other work on the computers), there was a high chance of physical damage (secure, protected server rooms weren’t the norm) and were, at times, left unmaintained (simply because they were forgotten).

The websites were prone to attacks and bugs because there wasn’t much thought put into keeping the “servers” secure. Even when working well, they were prone to crash because the computers could only handle so much traffic. Back up technology or the practice backing data was in its infancy.

Web Servers and Data Centers

The PC’s power was enhanced and, as its processing and storage power grew, it evolved into a server – a machine that was created for the purpose of serving more than one user at a time. The web hosting server was removed from individual care on a PC and moved to these servers which were then grouped together and placed in safety cabinets which were, in turn, located in secure server rooms.

By this time, security was of a critical concern and the physical removal of the servers into server rooms reduced the chances of their being physically accessed – by hackers and the cleaning staff alike. Better care was taken for the servers and their content, and some of the first policies and protocols were drafted regarding the way to handle administration, backups, breaches and content privacy and ownerships.

Focus was put into enhancing the peripheral hardware, redundancy and connectivity.

As huge a leap forward as it was, the move to the server environment brought with it some distinct advantages.

Businesses that wanted to host their own websites had to invest in huge server rooms, own servers with decent processing powers and have a reliable internet connection and bandwidth. The overhead alone involved in running these machines burnt a serious hole in the companies’ budget. The space that was needed to run a decent server room was becoming an expensive affair as real estate prices started to rocket. Hiring competent staff that could keep it all up and running was also an expense that they would rather do without.

When they needed to scale up for better performance, or due to increased demand, the companies found it an uphill task. In fact, upgrading meant nothing more than physically plugging-in hard disk drives but it all limiting – you could only enhance a server to some extent.

All in all, with this step although technology had made great advances, it came with a cost… a rather high one at that.

Advent of Virtual Servers

As the need for servers grew astronomically, so too did the need for more server space. If the demand was to be met, a better way of hosting websites was needed because putting up more physical servers wasn’t going to cut it anymore. But, the power needed to run them would be a costly expense.

The only way to get around these problems was to go the virtual way. When virtualization became a reality, the operating system of a machine could be separated from the physical hardware and both could perform as separate entities – this was called abstraction.

With abstraction came the enhanced capabilities of better utilizing the hardware as well as the ability to run multiple operating systems and applications on a single machine without interference from one another.

This was a great improvement but, again, there were some shortcomings among which the most important was the restriction due to finite resources. Even when virtual servers were made to work together it was still limited by the physical server capacity – also, still an expensive affair.

Cloud Computing

True liberation from the physical world was achieved with the advent of cloud computing. No longer was data limited to the walls of a server room and it literally “floated” in the cloud where everyone could access it from anywhere on the planet.

Tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft took it a step further and brought application services into the picture. Scaling up was no longer an issue as everything was digital; a few clicks was all that was required. This brought down the running costs and the price of hosting itself – so much so that anyone can have a site up and pay in cents per month.

Today, the internet is truly a tool for the masses to enjoy, learn with and make money with – mainly because of cloud computing.

The future still awaits and if the indications are anything to go by, we are at the dawn of new emerging revolutionary ways of hosting… we just need to wait a little bit longer.