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A short history of web hosting

The short version

• The web began on one computer at CERN. That computer was the first web server.
• In the mid-1990s, companies began to rent out space on their servers. Web hosting became a business.
• Later, one real server was split into many virtual ones. Then came the cloud.
• Today, many sites are plain files again, as the first one was.

1989 to 1990: one computer, one website

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He was working at CERN, a physics laboratory.^[1]

The first website was about the web project itself. It lived on Berners-Lee's own NeXT computer.^[1]

That machine was the first web server. A web server is a computer that stores web pages and sends them out when asked. The first one was called nxoc01.cern.ch, and later info.cern.ch.^[2]

A label on its case read: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"^[3] The warning made sense. If someone switched it off, the whole website vanished.

CERN began restoring that first website in 2013.^[1] Anyone can still visit it at the old address.

1991 to 1993: servers spread

The program that ran on the first server was called CERN httpd. It was the first web server software.^[4]

In August 1991, the web's files were put online for anyone to download.^[2] By December 1991, the first web server outside Europe was running. It was at SLAC, a laboratory in the United States.^[2]

Growth was fast. In January 1993 there were around 50 known web servers. By October 1993 there were over 200.^[2]

On 30 April 1993, CERN put the web software in the public domain.^[1] Anyone could now run a web server without paying a fee.

1994 to 1996: hosting becomes a business

At first, a website meant owning a server. Not every company had the money or skills for that. So web hosts began to offer space on their own servers instead.^[5]

Free hosting came early. GeoCities started in November 1994.^[6] By 1995, GeoCities and others were offering free hosting.^[5]

Server software moved on too. A group of webmasters made the first public release of Apache in April 1995.^[7] Within a year, it was the most used server on the internet.^[7]

Tools for building pages on the server arrived. PHP was created in 1994. At first it only counted visits to one man's online CV.^[8] The control panel cPanel, used to run hosting accounts, was first released in March 1996.^[9]

Late 1990s: stacks and delivery networks

Many hosts used the same free software together. In December 1998, this set was given a name: LAMP.^[10] It stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. See LAMP stack.

Busy sites needed help with traffic too. Content delivery networks arose in the late 1990s.^[11] They keep copies of a site on servers closer to each visitor.^[11] See Content delivery network.

2000s: virtual servers and the cloud

Virtualisation lets one real computer act like several separate ones. It became common on everyday servers after VMware ESX Server came out in 2001.^[12] Hosts used it to sell the virtual private server.

In 2006, Amazon released its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.^[13] People could now rent computing power on demand.

In September 2011, the US standards body NIST published a definition of cloud computing.^[14] It describes a shared pool of computing resources that people reach over a network.^[14] See Cloud hosting.

2010s onward: free certificates and static sites

A certificate lets a site use a secure, encrypted connection. Let's Encrypt gives them out for free.^[15] It launched on 12 April 2016.^[16] See Certificate authority.

Simple hosting also came back. Many services now build a site straight from its source files and serve it as plain files.^[5] See Static site.

In a way, the story has come full circle. Like the very first website, many modern sites are simple files on a server.