The NCSA's Mosaic browser appeared in 1993 and made the web visible to people who were not computer scientists. Web servers such as NCSA httpd, and then Apache in 1995, gave anyone with a Unix machine a way to publish. Companies started renting out space on their servers, at first mostly to businesses that wanted a page and had no interest in running a machine.
The first free homepage communities appeared in this period, including GeoCities (originally under another name) and Tripod. The result was a vast and often garish sprawl of personal pages, and an early lesson in what happens when many people share one set of resources.
Almost every argument about shared hosting today, from noisy neighbours to fair limits, was already visible in these first three years.
Mosaic changes who is looking
Before Mosaic, web browsers were tools for people who already worked in universities and labs. Mosaic, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, ran on common desktop systems and put text and images in the same window. That last detail mattered more than it sounds. Pages with pictures were something you could show to a relative. Netscape Navigator followed in 1994, built by some of the same people, and by the middle of the decade a home user with a dial-up modem could browse the web.
Demand came first. Supply, in the form of places to put pages, had to catch up.
Looking back, the order of events is the interesting part. A graphical browser, then a free server, then businesses prepared to rent out the combination. Each step lowered the skill needed by the next person in line, and that has been the pattern of the whole industry since.
From a server under the desk to rented space
NCSA httpd was free and ran on Unix. Apache began in 1995 as a set of patches gathered by a group of webmasters to fix and extend it. It became the most widely used web server for many years. With free software and a cheap Unix machine on a decent connection, a small firm could serve other people's pages as well as its own.
The earliest paying customers were businesses that wanted a presence, not a project. They had no wish to learn about daemons or leased lines. A hosting company sold them the result: a directory on someone else's machine, a place to upload files by FTP, and a web address.
Free homepages and the first shared-resource problem
Alongside the paid hosts came free ones. GeoCities began in 1994 under a different name and adopted the GeoCities name in 1995, organising users into themed "neighbourhoods". Tripod launched in 1995. Visitors could build a page with a form and a few clicks and have it online in minutes.
The results were noisy: tiled backgrounds, animated images, counters and guestbooks. They were also a lesson in operations. When thousands of pages share the same disks and the same network link, one popular page can slow everyone else. The providers answered with storage quotas and monthly traffic limits, the same levers that hosting plans use now.
What shared hosting looked like in practice
Many early accounts were nothing more than a directory under a user's home on a multi-user Unix system, which is why some old addresses carry a tilde followed by a username. Customers uploaded files over FTP and edited them with whatever they had. Scripts ran through CGI, in a cgi-bin directory, usually written in Perl.
Each site often needed its own IP address, because early web clients did not tell the server which name they were asking for. That requirement faded after the Host header in HTTP/1.1, which let one address serve many names and cut the cost of a small plan.
Commands worth running
The Host header is easy to see. Send a request to one IP address with two different names and compare the answers:
curl -sI -H "Host: www.example.com" http://203.0.113.10/
curl -sI -H "Host: blog.example.com" http://203.0.113.10/On a modern shared server the two replies can differ, because one address is serving many sites and the Host line decides which. In 1995 that arrangement would have been unusual, since each site expected an address of its own.