PHP was first released in 1995 and MySQL the same year. Together with Linux and Apache they formed the stack that would be called LAMP, and they made dynamic websites approachable for people who were not professional programmers. Control panels followed, with cPanel appearing in 1996, taking tasks that used to need command-line skills and putting them behind buttons.
Domain names were becoming valuable. For years, one company held the exclusive right to register .com addresses. In 1998 the US government began a transition that led to ICANN, and in 1999 registration opened to competition, which pushed prices down and created the registrar market we know today.
Two separate stories run through these years: how pages came to be built from a database, and how names turned from a free favour into property.
From static files to pages built on request
A static site is a folder of finished files. A dynamic one assembles each page when it is asked for, from templates and data. In the mid-1990s the usual way to do that was CGI: the server started a separate program, usually a Perl script, for each request. It worked, and it was slow and fiddly. Every hit started a new process, and a mistake in file permissions could expose the script's source or the server itself.
PHP began as a set of small tools by Rasmus Lerdorf for managing his own web page, released publicly in 1995. Its trick was to put code directly inside the HTML, so that a page could contain a few lines of logic. For anyone who knew HTML, the step up was short.
Why LAMP won
None of the four parts cost anything to license. Linux and Apache were already the usual server pairing, MySQL was a fast, easy database that appeared in 1995, and PHP made it simple to talk to MySQL. A hosting company could offer all of it on a single plan, and a customer could install a guestbook, a forum or a shop from a downloaded archive.
It also had a price. Code written by beginners and run on a shared machine is a security story waiting to be told, and old PHP habits, such as trusting every submitted value, produced years of hacked sites.
Control panels put buttons on the server
Creating a mail address, a database or a new domain once meant editing configuration files on the server, or opening a ticket and waiting for an administrator. cPanel, which appeared in 1996, put those tasks behind a web interface. Hosts could sell to people who had never opened a shell, and could hand routine work to the customer. The control panel became the face of shared hosting, and in various forms it still is. See the glossary for the terms.
Names become property
Domain registration was originally a service run for the research community and handled by a small group of operators. In the early 1990s Network Solutions took over registration of .com, .net and .org under an agreement with the US National Science Foundation. In 1995 registrations began to carry a fee, at about the time companies realised that a good name was worth money.
The result was a rush. Short words went first, then speculation: people registered brand names, product names and spellings they guessed a company would want. Disputes followed, and in 1999 a policy for resolving them (the UDRP) was adopted.
The end of the single seller
The US government's 1998 policy paper called for the system to be handed over to a non-profit body, and that body became ICANN. In 1999 the registry job (the master database for .com) was separated from the registrar job (selling names to the public), and the first few companies started competing as registrars. Prices fell, features multiplied, and moving a name between companies became a standard process. The body that oversaw all this is the subject of the 1998 piece in this series.