Series / Hosting Through the Years

Hosting Through the Years

15 stops in a history of where websites have lived, in date order.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, then working at CERN, circulated a proposal for a system to link documents across the lab's...

The NCSA's Mosaic browser appeared in 1993 and made the web visible to people who were not computer scientists. Web...

As the first online shops appeared, people wanted to send card numbers without them being read in transit. Netscape...

PHP was first released in 1995 and MySQL the same year. Together with Linux and Apache they formed the stack that would...

The domain name system had been run by a small group of individuals and organisations under US government contracts. In...

The bursting of the dot-com bubble thinned out the first wave of hosting companies, and the survivors consolidated....

Around 2001, commercial control panels such as Plesk appeared alongside cPanel, and operating-system-level...

Blogging platforms, photo sharing and social sites made publishing routine. Shared hosting boomed, with providers...

In 2006 Amazon launched S3 for storage and EC2 for computing, letting anyone rent capacity by the hour with a credit...

In 2012, ICANN opened applications for hundreds of new top-level domains, and the first appeared in 2013. Names ending...

Docker appeared in 2013 and popularised containers, a lightweight way to package an application with its dependencies....

In October 2016, a huge botnet built from poorly secured cameras and routers directed a flood of traffic at Dyn, a...

When the European GDPR came into force in May 2018, the public WHOIS system, which listed names, addresses and phone...

HTTP/3, built on QUIC, was standardised in 2022 and is now supported by the major browsers and many CDNs. Serverless...

In 2020, much of daily life moved online within weeks. Shops, schools, clinics and cinemas needed websites or bigger...