Similar to the ever-increasing number of Internet users, the demand for a trusted web hosting service has also shot up. It is clearly evident that web hosting services have eventually evolved a lot over time to establish today’s presence. It all began as an add-on service provided by the web domain providers and now it has evolved to become a self-potent service. The evolution journey of web hosting has been remarkable over the years.
In this article, I’ll be sharing with you how web hosting evolved over these years aided by advancements in technology along with the future of this super-demanding industry.
1. The Stone Age
The stone age of human civilization includes the making and using of tools, although in the most primitive form.
The stone age of the web hosting industry can be associated with the upcoming of workstations. Similar to the human stone age, the tools used (workstations) were quite clumsy, ineffective and primitive. As they marked the beginning of a new service, there was no other alternate technology present to get the job done.
Running a webserver using workstations might look a rare sight in today’s time. Working with workstations includes many drawbacks. The major one being its dependency on a single system for its working. Any unintended accident could hamper its performance and working. The biggest foe of workstation has always been negligence.
2. The Bronze Age
In the bronze age, humans began exploring more and there were signs of establishment of civilizations. Now more complex tools were available, permitting growth and perfection looked a road way ahead.
Overcoming the simplest and common problems of workstations were overcome by putting all the workstations in one common room, thereby, reducing the risks of any unintended accidents. This migration of workstations gave rise to modern-day data centers.
Hosting inside a data center offered other advantages as well. The major risk of workstations was well averted and people began to realize the significance of websites and were more cautious regarding the security of the data center. Now, data centers became more restricted and authorized areas, with access granted only to authorized personnel. New disaster mitigation methods were placed within data centers.
With many advantages, data centers also had a major drawback too. This drawback of the data center was related to investment volume. The data centers had to pay much more for using resources like electricity, floor area, etc. Also, there was difficulty in scaling and were inflexible.
3. The Iron Age
In the iron age, humans started exploring for more viable solutions, that would provide better tools and these would long last.
To overcome the shortcomings of datacenters, people now shifted their thinking process in a different direction. They restricted their search for more hardware, security, and space. This eventually led to the need for Virtual Servers. Virtualization was still a fresh introduced concept and such level of abstraction was newer witnessed before. It could separate the operating systems from the physical hardware and this created newer ways for application isolation and better usability of hardware. Virtualization was full-potent when used virtual clustering emerged.
Virtual Servers also like previous hosting solutions suffered setbacks as they also needed huge investments with a finite number of resources to match up, the developers had to put in a lot of efforts.
4. Modern Day
Virtual data centers with time discovered that they had similar problems like the old, traditional data centers. Though they were better managed and there was better utilization of servers in an efficient manner but were restricted to a single location only.
To overcome the shortcomings of data centers, Cloud hosting emerged in the hosting domain. Cloud hosting is highly flexible and scalable, where the websites use the exact amount of resources such as- CPU power, bandwidth, RAM and storage as per their needs. When Cloud hosting is used there is no wastage of resources. Also, Cloud hosting depicts no website-specific servers, thus the problem regarding physical space of data centers at a single space could be solved. Further problems related to data integrity were resolved using Cloud hosting.
Major improvements on the physical data centers resulted in making the Cloud hosting a cheaper alternate to operate and maintain, thus, making it very affordable to the customers.
5. Future of Web Hosting
With so many advancements made over the generations, it is clear that the future is very bright, although, it is an obvious challenge to predict what the future holds for the web hosting industry. With a number of advantages, it is clear that Cloud hosting may continue to rise with more advancements in its working. The legacy applications still hold a number of benefits, the developers continue to find ways of utilizing the legacy applications in a hybrid way to reap some competitive benefits of Cloud computing.
It is also evident that the future of web hosting would be more abstract and advanced than the Cloud, though there is a long way to go for Cloud in order to reach its maximum potential. One never knows whether Cloud would be the next biggest hosting provider on the web. To know more about web hosting related services, visit bodHOST.