It’s no secret that there has been an on-going war over customers in the web hosting industry for many years. Together with the technical evolution of computer hardware, this fierce competition has drastically increased what you get for your money when you buy a web hosting account.
The people behind Pingdom originally came from the web hosting industry, so we tend to keep an eye on the development in that industry out of sheer curiosity (aside from the fact that we have a lot of web hosting companies as customers, so we deal with them on a daily basis). We know that the changes in what the hosting industry offers have been enormous, but we wanted to find out exactly how much things have changed.
Reaching 10 years into the past
Thanks to the good old Wayback Machine, we were able to look at archived web pages of a few web hosting companies that were active 10 years ago. We selected Dreamhost, Liquidweb and Hostway, for no other reason than them being well-known today and that they were around 10 years ago.
We looked at three things. The price of a regular, consumer-oriented shared web hosting account, and how much storage space and data transfer (traffic) was included in that account. And boy have things changed.
Let us visualize the change for you.
The image above is based on the averaged offers of the three web hosts for the shared web hosting account we described above.
Content has changed, not prices
| Web host | Package price per month (USD) 1998 | Package price per month (USD) 2008 |
|---|---|---|
| Hostway.com | 13.95 | 13.95 |
| Liquidweb.com | 24.95 | 14.95 |
| Dreamhost.com | 9.95 | 9.95 |
| Average | 16.28 | 12.95 |
You can say that the term “price war” that has been thrown around isn’t necessarily what has actually been happening. The war has been one of features, adding increasing amounts of storage and data transfer. Prices haven’t changed all that much (if at all), but you get a lot more bang for your buck these days. And with a lot, we mean A LOT, as you will see if you continue reading.
Increase in storage space
| Web host | Storage in MB 1998 | Storage in MB 2008 | Increase in storage (times) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostway.com | 200 | 12,000 | 60 |
| Liquidweb.com | 250 | 1,000 | 4 |
| Dreamhost.com | 10 | 500,000 | 50,000 |
| Average | 153 | 171,000 | 1,115 |
The hosting industry has clearly benefitted from the huge advances in hard drive technology (and of course much cheaper hard drives in general).
The largest increase (of these three) comes from Dreamhost, who have increased the storage they offer by 50,000 times. (Yes, that’s right. Fifty thousand times.)
Increase in data transfer (traffic)
| Web host | Traffic in GB 1998 | Traffic in GB 2008 | Increase in traffic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostway.com | 6 | 250 | 41.67 |
| Liquidweb.com | N/A (“unlimited”) | 60 | N/A |
| Dreamhost.com | 2 | 5,000 | 2,500 |
| Average | 4 | 1,770 | 442.5 |
(Numbers are per month.)
Data transfer numbers have increased, but not as much as storage. Network capacity is apparently not keeping up with storage space.
Here again it’s Dreamhost, out of these three, that have increased the most. 2,500 times more traffic per month. (Their offer in 1998 actually said “unlimited”, but a look at their terms of service revealed this to mean 2GB per month.)
Bang per buck
| Web host | MB per dollar (storage) 1998 | MB per dollar (storage) 2008 | GB per dollar (traffic) 1998 | GB per dollar (traffic) 2008 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostway.com | 14.34 | 860.22 | 0.43 | 17.92 |
| Liquidweb.com | 10.02 | 66.89 | N/A | 4.01 |
| Dreamhost.com | 1.01 | 50,251.26 | 0.20 | 502.51 |
| Average | 9.42 | 13,204.63 | 0.25 | 136.68 |
This table really shows how much more you get for your money compared to ten years ago.
*cough* Overselling? *cough*
There has been a lot of discussion about overselling (i.e. offering more than you can actually deliver to everyone), and some of these numbers do indicate this to some extent, at least those of Dreamhost. It’s hard to look at these numbers without thinking that, so that is why we mention it.
To be fair, they have gone on the record in their blog explaining the practice and their reasoning behind it (similar to mobile carriers not having capacity to handle everyone calling at once). Anyway, this article was never meant to be about overselling. It was meant to be about now vs then.
Web hosting 10 years from now?
We only looked at storage and data transfer here, but there are of course also other factors and features that add more value to web hosting packages these days compared to 10 years ago.
We are not going to speculate what hosting will look like 10 years from now, though. Judging by what has happened in the last 10 years, we don’t even dare to guess that far ahead into the future. But please feel free to do so in the comments!
