Fast-forward 26 years and the Internet certainly has grown up. Having evolved in leaps and bounds, the technology that supports the web has also had to advance to keep up with it. People can now carry the Internet around with them in their pockets, with currently more mobile Internet users in the world than desktop users.
With over half of the world’s population now online, the World Wide Web has become a community in itself – the total number of WordPress users alone is enough to rival the entire population of Turkey. As an invention, the web is impressively successful and it’s exciting to think what will come next.
Bigger and better
The average size of a website has slowly grown over time, from humble beginnings of well under a megabyte in size at the turn of the century to the ‘multi-meg’ websites of today. Website owners continue to build more creative and engaging websites, which in turn makes the size of them bigger, putting pressure on the underlying infrastructure.
It’s all well and good that websites look amazing, but its what’s at the back-end, holding it up, that’s the most important thing to consider. There are currently around 966 million websites available today and it’s web hosting that is at the foundation of keeping them all stable. However, to keep up with an ever-growing demand, web hosting has also had to evolve at a rapid pace.
Back in 1991, in order to host a website, you would have only needed to have your own server. The idea of web hosting began when big businesses would rent out their spare server space to other companies that wanted to host their own websites. Now, web hosting has turned into a global industry itself, and it is expected to reach over $143bn by 2020.
These days, it is possible to buy a low end web hosting service for as cheap as a cup of tea, allowing businesses to ‘rent’ space instead of outright owning it. There is a huge variety of web hosting services out there – some come with all the bells and whistles attached, while a plethora of companies offer web hosting to suit specific website needs, service and performance.
So where are we heading?
In just over a generation, the first website has been joined by over 900 million others, becoming one of the most important, extensively used information and knowledge tools ever created. This type of rapid growth brings with it constant change. With 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, experts are predicting that there will be 44 zettabytes of digital data in existence by 2020 – and a significant amount of this will live on the web.
Mobile operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are aiming to stay ahead of these performance and capacity demands with the launch of superfast broadband and 5G mobile networks. Today’s ‘superfast’ connection speeds mean that a 1GB file only takes around a minute and a half to download on a 100MB broadband service. Comparing this to twenty years ago, when broadband wasn’t around and businesses relied on 56k dial-up modems, the exact same file would have taken roughly two days to download.
Another example of the changes that will most likely occur, is that Tim Berners-Lee’s initial vision of The Semantic Web, ‘a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines’, might become a bigger reality. The Semantic Web is a huge global graph of linked data that will allow apps to automatically create new meaning from information available. The future could see metadata – data that is designed to be read by machines, not humans – become a more significant part of the online experience.
Looking at the next 25 years, it is certain that an even more evolved version of the web will still be with us, permeating our lives. But with the speed that technology is developing, it’s almost a test for tech futurists and visionaries to predict what it might look like.
