The wild west of webhosting 1997

I remember the wild west of the internet back in 1997 when I registered my website domain name for my freelance illustration company. I uploaded my website to a free internet service called B.I.P. Bottnia internet Provider and got free internet to my home, and 10 MB of free space for my website and 1 free email address. That was a lot back then. BIP was later bought by Spray network. I really liked that company. You got free internet with a 56 k modem which probably woked up the neighbours and had to put up with advertizing while pages were loading.

But it was okey, their little astronaut boy logo was kind of cool. I still have the address with a page that directs it to my current website on the professional webhost. Funny, still website visitors come to my website via that old single page with a long website address. Kind of cute and so i still keep the 10 MB for sentimentality reasons. And it’ s still free.

In 1998 – 99 i found a so called dedicated webhost, web hotel as we call it in sweden. In 98-99 it was runned by a young guy in south of sweden in a small town. One day i called the support and found out it was just a guy, and his father answered the phone and said he was out and didnt know when he was coming home. But should be home before dinner. That was the cute home feel of internet back then. He later sold his company he runned from his boy room at his parents house to another guy in another small town close to his. Still just one guy but he seemed to have an office and was running his web host business on the side. He too later sold his comapny to a real AB company who later bought several webhost companies taking market shares and they too was bought by an even larger AB (corporate) company. All that happened in 2 – 3 years time and was considered ages during the internet gold rush. When you start to think about it thats what internet is: a very short time span with lots happening tech wise.

Today things are slightly different indeed. When the dot com crash came it didnt kill the internet and world wide web. It rejuvinated it and and became much more professionall.

There was a lot of fun when it all arrived to the general public. So much wild west. I learned about the internet from other young guns at the various internet cafes in 1997-99. And trial and error and spending hours at these cafes in the evenings when i was single. Not many such cafes left in Sweden today with so many having their wifi sorted in other ways. I believe there is just one single internet cafe around in the area i frequent the most in biking in and out of town. Compared to 15 years ago.

I wonder what is coming next that blow our minds

Stefan Lindblad