Sunday, 21 August 2011

Web Hosting 101

By William MacMahon


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.

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.

An interesting point to mention here is that the militants developed the ARPA at the same time as they developed NASA, in order to find a manner in which the United States could make pace to catch up with USSR in the space arena after launching Sputnik, an artificial Russian satellite. Computer networking initially meant packet switching, based on the concept that it would be possible to send data through telephone lines as small packages rather than using the solid lines of circuit. In this manner, the connections would be used only when information was traveling through it, which would free up space on the system for the computer to perform more activities. Later on, while working on a project for allowing the telecommunication system to even survive a nuclear war, Paul Baran would come up with the Hot Potato networking design, which would lay the base for what would come to be known as 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.

As the internet expanded, its user base grew and it was no longer the preserve of computer literate people and technically minded folk. New features made it easier for the common person to use the system but equally,there was a drive to push technology further, so the setup became more complex in other ways. It was predicted by the business sector that the internet would boom and be a future hit and many organizations attempted to capitalize on this.

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.

Today there are over 35,000 businesses that play host to in excess of 100 websites through their server. This industry is growing due to healthy competition and in the time it takes you to read this article, there are probably hundreds more companies who have joined up. The WWW has had many programs but the first was a hypertext editor which made its debut in the NeXt machine. This progress was brought about by Nicola Pellow, a student, who brought about the line mode browser. Its main purpose was to provide a platform for discussion by people looking to research certain areas and this was made possible by the server publishing details of HTTP, HTML and UDI. Further progress was enabled when internet browsers such as Mosaic or Cello were created which allowed people to operate and search on machines which were not the NeXT model. The next notable landmark year was 1994 which heralded the start of the World Wide Consortium when firms came together to develop similar practices for web usage and which became the basis for a world of web sites.

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.

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 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.




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