Personal Web Page - History

History

Since the early 1990s most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have provided a free small personal, user-created page along with free Usenet News service. These were all considered part of full Internet service. Also several free web hosting services such as Geocities provided free web space for personal web pages. These free web hosting services would typically include web-based site management and a few pre-configured scripts to easily integrate an input form or guestbook script into the user's site. Since the early 2000s, the rise of blogging eased the creation of personal web pages further, with portable, free ready-made blogging scripts and applications such as My Blog. At the same time, a personal web presence became easier with the increased popularity of social networking services, some with blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and Blogger provided an attractive and easy-to-use CMS.

With the collapse of the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century the ISP industry consolidated, and the focus of web hosting services shifted away from the surviving ISP companies to independent Internet hosting services and to ones with other affiliations. For example, many university departments and television companies provided personal pages for professors or on-air personalities as a perquisite. Web hosting companies either charge a monthly fee, or provide service that is "free" (advertising based) for personal web pages. These are priced or limited according to the total size of all files in bytes on the host's hard drive, or by bandwidth, (traffic), or by some combination of both. For those customers who continue to use their ISP for these services, national ISPs commonly continue to provide both disk space and help including ready-made drop-in scripts.