The bursting of the dot-com bubble thinned out the first wave of hosting companies, and the survivors consolidated. Hosting became a commodity business with thin margins and strong competition on price. Virtual private servers appeared, giving small businesses a middle option between shared plans and a dedicated machine.
WordPress launched in 2003 as a fork of an earlier blogging tool. The idea that anyone could publish with a simple interface, and that a hosting account was all you needed, changed the shape of the web, and created the biggest single category of hosting customers.
These years look like a downturn followed by a quiet recovery, but they set up the market that exists now.
The bubble bursts
Share prices of internet companies peaked in early 2000 and fell hard over the following two years. Hosting and colocation had been financed on the assumption that demand would keep doubling. Data centres were built ahead of customers, and when the customers, many of them start-ups with no revenue, disappeared, so did a number of the providers. Some went bankrupt, some were bought for the buildings and the network, and some shrank to their profitable core.
The effect on customers was mixed. Prices dropped and capacity was cheap, but a hosting company that vanished took its customers' sites with it, sometimes with a few days' notice. It was an early lesson in keeping your own copy of everything, and in registering your domain in your own name.
Hosting turns into a commodity
Once the dust settled, hosting was a business of volume. Servers were standardised, control panels automated account creation, and the cost of adding one more customer to an existing machine was close to zero. Competition was therefore mostly on price and on the headline numbers: disk space, monthly traffic, number of mail accounts.
Plans now sat on a ladder. At the bottom, shared hosting, many sites on one server. At the top, a dedicated machine for a single customer. Between them, from about 2001, a virtual private server, with its own root access but sharing the physical hardware. The Host Talk series looks at how those rungs compare today.
From editing files to filling in a form
Before blogging software, updating a website meant editing an HTML file on your own computer and uploading it by FTP. Adding a new entry meant also editing the index page and the archive. Blogging tools turned that into a text box and a button. The software stored posts in a database, built the page, the archive and the feed from them, and displayed them in a chosen design.
Blogger appeared in 1999 as a hosted service, and Movable Type in 2001 as software you ran on your own account. WordPress followed in 2003, forked from an earlier tool called b2/cafelog by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, and released as open source. It required PHP and MySQL, which was exactly what an ordinary hosting plan already offered.
Why WordPress became the biggest customer
A new site was now a matter of buying a plan, uploading the software and running an installer. Themes changed the look without code, and plugins added features. A huge community formed around that, and hosting companies noticed that most new customers wanted the same thing. Control panels added one-click installers, plans advertised being "optimised" for it, and the support queues filled with the same few problems: updates, plugin conflicts, slow pages, hacked installs.
It also made a large, uniform target. The same software on millions of accounts meant a flaw found once could be used against all of them. That is the origin of much of what hosting security teams now do.
What it meant for hosts
For hosting companies, the arrival of blogs had a quiet commercial effect: customers no longer needed a web designer, so they no longer needed to be businesses. A teacher, a gardener, a football fan could rent a plan for a few pounds a month. Volume rose, and so did the share of customers who had never run a server and did not intend to learn.
Try it on your own site
On a site you manage, look at what is installed and when it last changed. For a WordPress site over SSH, with WP-CLI available:
wp core version
wp plugin list --update=availableAnything listed with an update waiting has been left open for a reason you should know. Our troubleshooting guide covers slow and broken installs.
What else people want to know
Did blogging need a special host?
Hosted services needed none. The self-installed ones needed PHP and a database, which most hosts supplied.
Why did comment spam appear?
Search rankings began to depend on links, so links in open comment boxes had a value. In 2005 the major search engines introduced the nofollow attribute to take the incentive away.