The History of Hosting — an archival history of web hosting

WebHostingTalk was founded in 1998 as a watering hole for the people building the early web's plumbing: the sysadmins, resellers, and entrepreneurs who rented rack space, sold gigabytes, and rebooted servers at three in the morning. For a quarter century it has recorded, post by post, the rise and fall of an entire industry.

This site is a chronicle drawn from that record — the threads the community itself propelled to the top, the prices they argued over, the companies they loved and buried. It is a draft, growing in step with the crawl beneath it.

1,372<br>Threads crawled

259,621<br>Posts indexed

23,772<br>Candidate threads

Threads by year, in the archive so far

Each bar is one year's high-signal threads recovered from the forum. The crawl proceeds newest→oldest in priority; coverage fills in over time.

20002002200420062008201020122014201620182020202220242026

The names that come up

Most-mentioned companies across crawled posts — the cast of the story.

Whmcs4,190Google2,403Burstnet1,883Godaddy1,565Hostgator1,405Softlayer1,284Enom1,186Fdc1,077Site51,062Ovh1,031Theplanet920Blesta690

Rise and fall — companies by year

Each row is a company's mention volume across the years crawled. The silhouettes show who ruled which era.

WhmcsGoogleBurstnetGodaddyHostgatorSoftlayerEnomFdcSite5Ovh20002002200420062008201020122014201620182020202220242026

The price of hosting, 2001 onward

Plan prices extracted from offer posts ($/mo). Each dot is one advertised plan.

$0$9$19$29$39

$20$10$29$20$10$25$25$20$14$19$10$16$10$5$20$8$20$31$4$26$8$30$14$40$20$1620002002200420062008201020122014201620182020202220242025

2000 — 2009The 2000s<br>On September 11, 2001, a user named microsol posted "Terrible plane crash in New York" to WebHostingTalk, linking to CNN. The thread accumulated 506 replies, some of which veered into a debate about whether Sri Lanka's Buddhist response to the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan statues offered a model for civilized restraint. This was a hosting forum. It was also, like it or not, a community.

The decade began with four crawled threads in 2000 and a median plan price of $19.95 per month. By 2002, the crawl captured 119 threads, and someone using the handle sailor was offering an AMD XP 1700 dedicated server with 300GB of multi-homed bandwidth for $99 per month — an offer that drew 508 replies and at least one complaint about unanswered email. The median price that year was $29.00, the highest of the decade. They remember the scams.

"TimPD, earhost.com, paradise-designs.net All a SCAM!!" appeared in 2002, posted by Vortech, who alleged that a designer named Tim had promised refunds through a cascade of excuses — merchant account problems, checks in the mail, wire transfers pending — before going silent entirely. Seven hundred and fifty replies later, a user called clockwork observed that he would not do business with Tim, nor with most of the people posting in the thread. This was, perhaps, the forum's first great lesson in counterparty risk: the person you were yelling at might also be the person hosting your mail.

The companies that dominated mention counts tell their own story. Google appeared 1,306 times, GoDaddy 1,018, eNom 972, BurstNET 856, ThePlanet 827. cPanel accumulated 3,443 technology mentions against PHP's 2,782 and MySQL's 998. DDoS appeared 853 times, which was a lot or not enough, depending on whether your server was among those turned off. In 2002, FDC was disconnected by Cogent, and a user called Aussie Bob offered his sympathies: "You're dead in the water while your host is dead in the water." ThePlanet went down in 2005, generating 750 replies, and again in 2008, when someone named tinkertim wondered what single machine was worth over half a million dollars monthly to lease. ThePlanet garnered 827 mentions, second only to BurstNET. AngelNetworkz, operated by Donna Mercer out of Toronto, collapsed in 2004, producing 659 replies and a separate thread about filing complaints with the Toronto Police Fraud Unit. RegisterFly's implosion in 2006 drew 727 replies and a mention of ICANN warnings, because even domain registrars could fail.

The forum's own infrastructure was not immune. In 2009, in a thread titled "Recent WHT down time," SoftWareRevue reported that a sophisticated attacker had gained access to WHT's offsite backup servers, deleted all backups, then dropped database tables. The user table — usernames, email addresses, hashed passwords — was posted to file-sharing sites. "I guess the option to hide my e-mail address on my profile no longer matters," wrote DevMonkey, who had found the table downloadable via Google in under a minute.

Meanwhile, in 2009, a host called StableHost advertised unlimited bandwidth and disk for $1.75 per month, with a 50% off coupon for WHT visitors, and SSD drives in all shared machines. A customer asked whether that meant $1.98 per month after the code. The median plan price...