The dawn of new webmasters

Every New Year is seen by many as a new chance to do things they wanted to do or something like that but sadly I do not see it like that. I see that every new year, technology is getting better and better.

Sure, some will see this as a good thing but every year more and more people are getting online. Now, this is not a bad thing at all, but every day I see a new website open up within the hour. Now, I am not saying it is a bad thing in itself for people opening websites but what has happened to the days when it took days to even get things online?

I remember the days when it took ages to write up a few HTML pages and it took even longer for the modem to dial up to your ISP and when it finally did it would be so slow that it took ages to even upload. I recall the days when to get a website like this (and originally I did the following to get it up and working) that you had to download a script like WordPress which back then would have taken you 40-60 minutes to download and then you extracted it all. After that, you would have filled in all the MySQL detail but back then you would not have had all these control panels that do it all for you rather you had to make the database yourself.

Once you have done all that, you then have to upload it all to your web space. Back then, hosting was not like it is now. Finding a web host was hard as you had to look for one that supported PHP and whatever you needed and the likes of 5GB HDD space back then were nearly impossible to find. Now, you have everyone offering free hosting to anyone that may need it. Free hosting today is honestly much better than it was in the past. In the past, you would have likely gone with a free host that went down so often that you would not believe it. Now, the freest host (well, at least those that supports themselves) are giving a service that is compared to paid hosting. While this article will not get into that now, I am sure I will do one about it later).

Then uploading the files was annoying. You would have to start your upload and wait a few hours as it slowly uploaded each file one by one using FTP (or in some cases a file manager). Now, I can get WordPress installed within 5 minutes if I am using an online installer script or 10 minutes if I have to download/upload the actual files myself. These days, anyone can call themselves a webmaster by just uploading a couple of files and blam – an instant website.

But none of this is bad. Services like WordPress, Blogger, 000webhost, InvisionFree and Forumer offer anybody the ability to put their beliefs and their thoughts onto the Internet for free is not the Internet all about a free and open commutation network?

Or do I just miss being able to charge people £10 for a CMS installation?