Web hosting is a big industry these days with so many people and businesses running sites of their own. Royal, which is Pingdom’s official blog, recently took a look at web hosting now versus 10 years ago. It’s actually amazing to see the changes in storage space offered, and the increases in data transfer between then and now. What’s interesting though is that while so many things have increased, one thing hasn’t, and that’s the price. The cost of web hosting has managed to stay exactly the same, if not lower, than what it was back in 1998. Take a look:
First of all, notice that the average price for web hosting back in 1998 was $16.28 per month while 10 years later in 2008, it’s actually lower at $12.95. You’d think with inflation it would have at least gone up some, but it didn’t. Of course back in 1998 there weren’t as many web hosting options out there. These days there are so many that they all compete for your business and do so by keeping prices at a minimum.
Next on the chart above is storage space. Back in 1998, companies on average offered 153 MB of storage to their customers. Today it’s 171,000 MB which is quite the difference. That increase in storage space is due in part because of the advances in the hard drive technology. With the increase in storage space came the increase in data transfer – 4GB back in 1998 compared to 1,770 GB today on average. As Royal points out, obviously network capacity isn’t keeping up with storage space because the increase wasn’t quite as large.
So what can we make out of all of this? Well, obviously people today are getting a bigger bang for their buck. More importantly though, the changes we see in the graph above from 1998 to 2008 seem natural. There’s been a natural progression in technology and of course storage space and data transfer are going to increase drastically over time. After seeing the changes that occurred over the last 10 years, what do you think storage space and data transfer will be like 10 years from now?
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Well we get a lot more data transfer and lot more space that’s for sure.
It’s nice to see this stuff evolve, and it’s hard to think that you would have only been able to post a few dozen digital images on a server with the storage space they had back then. Of course at that time digital cameras were just emerging.
What you haven’t factored in, of course, is customer service. I was never renting webspace back then, but I imagine you at least got to speak to a real person and weren’t shafted on a million and one small-print get-out clauses …
… still, bitterness aside, it is surely scary how fast things move. I still remember getting my first hard drive for my 8086 PC my father built me. 20MB … “Wow, I’ll *never* fill that up!”
It really depends on your service provider. For example, we can get the people who host our site on the phone in under a minute 24-hours a day. But then again we don’t have a shared host either.
You forgot that overselling is a problem now, and is the reason for 10000 TB bandwidth (not that the hosts can really provide such quantities)… Oops, maybe the Pingdom blog forgot it