Thanks! I teach IT to Chinese students who want to study abroad in America for college. Interestingly, part of their final grade is to make a powerpoint presentation about how technology (especially computers) has changed over the past ten years. I came across this page today, and it's been a big help to my students looking for raw data. And how appropriate that it's a perfect 10 year period! Thanks for the research! -Chris

One other useful factor left out of the interesting analysis is how the number of Internet users/websites have changed over the 10 year period. Obviously, there would have been an almost exponential increase in the number of Internet users/websites now compared to 10 years ago, and by extension the industry size/revenue. Though web hosting companies offer more resources now than 10 years ago, they individually and altogether make more money now than then. There lies the incentive to give more features... One should reasonable expect that in ten years, more value would be delivered per dollar costs, but then costs would be much lower and the industry would be much bigger.

I think where you've seen hosting companies differentiate themselves is not on specs but rather on service, support and up time. Hosting the latest greatest technology is relatively easy. Keeping a website online constantly is the difficult part.

How I read this comparison is that web hosts haven't really done much in ten years but drive up some core specs. Most hosts are still hosting in the same manner and architecture that they did 10 years ago. Web hosting is a drive towards commodity. What really happened is that the web hosts, who could have been at the forefront of the hosted application space, squandered the decade offering the same old thing with little to no innovation. -matt

> It’s amazing. In 10 years you have more than 2 orders of magnitude difference! Anyone who's read any of Ray Kurzweil's books will not find this amazing, but expected. Growth in this and all known "knowledge contexts" is exponential - not only that, the growth of the growth is exponential. 2018 will be an interesting year, to be sure.

@ Paolo: You have a point, but on the other hand you have had to tie yourself up for 5 years to get that price. Many web hosts offer discounts if you sign up for a long time. @ Danny : You're right, we didn't take inflation into account (it didn't occur to us, to be honest ;) ). To our defense, doing an advanced calculation of all the factors involved (infrastructure, labor, etc, not to mention all other things that are included in hosting packages) would be a bit outside the scope of this article. It would be interesting to see a thorough study of this, though. We chose to focus on data transfer and storage space because they are probably the two biggest factors that people tend to look at.

I pay much less than that for shared hosting -- I paid around 140$ for 5 years, making it around 2.5$/month.

It's amazing. In 10 years you have more than 2 orders of magnitude difference! 3 in some cases. Assuming this keeps up it kinda makes you wonder about 2018. That or the bandwidth/storage will just be a commodity and the hosting companies will need to start competing more and more on service since the fixed costs will become negligible.

"What about inflation?" Using the "Inflation Calculator" tool at http://www.bls.gov/cpi/ and 1997 to 2007, $16.28 in 1998 would be worth about $21.03 today. That's a price decrease in real terms of 62%. It would be interesting to calculate infrastructure and labor costs over the years. The scary thing about web hosting is constantly keeping up with and migrating to bigger and better technology. Sincerely, -danny