Blogging platforms, photo sharing and social sites made publishing routine. Shared hosting boomed, with providers advertising ever bigger storage allowances. Search engines became the front door of the web, and being found became a business problem.
In 2007 and 2008, smartphones with real browsers arrived, and sites that had been designed for wide monitors suddenly had to work on a palm-sized screen. The idea of the responsive site followed.
For a hosting company, the period brought a new kind of customer, a new kind of traffic, and the first signs that the model of one account on one shared server was going to be stretched.
Publishing becomes ordinary
The phrase Web 2.0 gained currency in 2004, used to describe sites whose content came from their users. Photo sharing, social networks and video followed in quick succession: Flickr and Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006. Alongside the large services, millions of people ran their own blogs, forums and photo galleries on rented hosting. A site was no longer a brochure. It was a place where people turned up, signed in and posted.
That changed the load. A static page costs almost nothing to serve. A page that is built from a database for every visitor, and then changed by comments, costs processor time and memory every time. Hosts saw the first signs of a pattern that persists: the busiest accounts are not always the largest businesses.
Storage allowances grow
Disk space and bandwidth were the main headline numbers on hosting plans, and they inflated fast. Part of the reason was real: disks got much cheaper, and webmail services offering a gigabyte of mailbox space, which began in 2004, made smaller allowances look stingy. Part was marketing. Plans began to promise "unlimited" space and traffic, with fair-use terms in the small print.
Those terms were not decoration. A server has a finite disk, finite memory and a finite network link. Most customers use a small fraction of what they are allowed, and the price of the plan rests on that. When one account tried to use all it was offered, the host would step in, and the dispute that followed was an early example of an argument that still runs.
Search becomes the front door
As more sites appeared, finding them depended on search engines, and in practice on one of them. Ranking well turned into a business concern, and a trade grew up around it. Hosts found themselves answering questions that had nothing to do with servers: why a site had dropped from the results, whether the address of the hosting server mattered, and what a site map was. Google introduced Sitemaps in 2005, and the format was shared with other engines in 2006.
The technical points that were in the host's hands were real, though modest. Page speed, uptime, correct redirects when a site moved, and careful handling of missing pages all affected how well a site was crawled. The HTTP status codes guide explains the ones that matter.
The phone gets a real browser
Mobile web access had existed for years in cut-down form. In 2007 the iPhone brought a full browser to a handheld device, and in 2008 the first Android phone followed. The screen was about 320 pixels wide, against 1024 or more on the monitors that most sites were designed for. A fixed-width page was either shrunk to illegibility or needed to be scrolled sideways.
The first answers were separate mobile sites on their own subdomains, and a meta tag that told the browser how wide the page should be. The more lasting answer, named responsive design a little later, in 2010, was one site whose layout adapted to the width of the screen. For hosts the effect was heavier pages, more images and growing attention to page weight, which the page weight tool can measure.
The first cracks in shared hosting
In the same years, cloud computing began. Amazon launched its storage service in March 2006 and rentable virtual servers later that year, charged by the hour. Software frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django made it easier to build applications that did not suit a standard shared plan. None of this ended shared hosting, which kept growing, but it opened the alternatives that people now weigh when they choose a host.
Commands worth running
To see what a phone sees, ask for a page with a mobile browser's identity and compare the size to a normal request:
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{size_download}\n" https://example.com/
curl -s -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone)" -o /dev/null -w "%{size_download}\n" https://example.com/If the numbers differ, the site is serving different content to phones. If they match, the page relies on its stylesheet to adapt.
What else people want to know
Was the iPhone the first mobile web?
No. Earlier phones had browsers, often stripped down. The iPhone's change was a full browser that ran ordinary pages.
Did "unlimited" plans mean unlimited?
Never in the literal sense. Terms of service set practical limits on processes, memory and files, and still do.