When the world wide web was introduced as part of the Internet, it was the start for a new industry – the Web Hosting Industry. Large corporations were the first ones to adopt the new medium. The Internet up to that point was mainly used by the military and Universities. The corporations hosted their own websites or the few data centers around took care of business. In the beginning was no space for the personal and small business websites – they did not play a significant role at all. The new technology caught more and more interest and the world wide web started booming. More and more early adaptors joined in and helped making the Internet what it is today. Imagine that SPAMMERS were fought back by the community by flooding their mail inboxes with empty responses over and over. Nobody knew how to disguise the identity like SPAMMERS do it today. SPAM emails were the exception. Good ol’ days.
The web hosting industry really started growing when the domain names became more affordable to the broad masses. Before then, you had to pay $35 USD per year and more, to register a domain name. Even $35.00 was already a price that attracted more and more folks to the Internet – but it also kept many away.
Also – when the free operating system Linux became the dominating platform for many websites it reduced the cost to build up a hosting business. New companies started offering web hosting services all over the place. It was affordable because except for hardware there was no additional cost involved in regards to software and tools.
The Internet grew in a really fast speed in the late 90’s and 2000′s. As an end-user – if you did not had your own domain name, some people really actually looked at you in a very strange way.
So, people who never had the need to have a website, suddenly entered the market and all the new web hosting providers were there to take care of them and to make a profit. The growth of the web hosting industry was tremendous and it was easy to make some good money in a short period of time. More and more companies entered the market and the young evolving industry turned into a wild madness.
The customers had difficulties to get through this jungle of companies and to find a decent web host. As many web hosting companies turned out to be less then reliable, it created a big problem for the industry and for the clients. The good web hosts were now thrown into the same pot with the bad web hosts and needed to establish a good reputation first. Some competitors even started bashing the competition making it more difficult for everyone. There was (is) no respect for the competition and many web hosts are playing unfair in this game.
As things were not worse enough – fraudulent web hosting clients and SPAMMERS added to the mix. SPAM is the biggest danger to the Internet as we know. If these people do not stop, they will dig their own graves. I hate SPAMMERS – these people belong into prison. I am amazed how bad it got and there is no cure in sight. I think the pressure of the large countries will hopefully help to get rid of this lousy pack soon. The same is true for credit card fraud. Especially the web hosting industry has been hit hard and the high credit card processing fees are a result of this. Unless countries like Russia, Singapore or Malaysia start to implement tougher laws and enforce them, this problem will not go away.
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