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Oh the good ol days. $10/m for slow PHP shared hosting and $150 for an SSL certificate too.
by nextts 2y ago
Oh the good ol days. $10/m for slow PHP shared hosting and $150 for an SSL certificate too.
- dkh 2y agoWeb hosts competing based on who had the prettiest cPanel theme. The number of email accounts were allowed was something that mattered. If you were lucky enough to get SSH access, it was jailed and only really allowed you to move files around easier or edit something with vim/nano. Oh, I have unintentionally become a GoDaddy customer (a company I have spent ample time hating and shitting on over the years) because I was a legacy Media Temple customer going back to like 2006 and I still just can't be bothered to clear out everything on those sites/domains and they eventually got acquired
- DonHopkins 2y ago[flagged]
- endofreach 2y agoLet's encrypt has done great work with certs for free. But they do still cost money. Insane for how long unencrypted traffic was the default. But i could not have done anything, if browsers had soft-enforced https earlier. I simply could not have paid that money.
- chias 2y agoYou and everyone else: unencrypted stopped being the default as a pretty direct consequence of increased accessibility of TLS certificates.
- mattl 2y agoHow do they still cost money?
- cship2 2y agoYeah in late 90s telnet to server was the default. So all those delicious cli were just flowing in the Ethernet traffic in plain text.
- account42 2y agoYou could get free SSL certs before LE. What LE changed was making it possible to fully automate the process.
- scarab92 2y agoI still can't get my head around why a .com costs $9.59 (plus registrar margin) There are 160 million registered .com domain names. I understand that operating root servers isn't free, but surely they don't cost $1.5 billion per year! Wikipedia's hosting costs are $3 million per year, for comparison.
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoBecause it's a natural monopoly. Nobody ever got taken seriously with a .biz address. (.com is basically price-regulated because of this, FWIW, Verisign can't just raise prices whenever or however it wants. But obviously it's still a pretty sweet deal for them, I'd imagine.)
- dylan604 2y agoHell, even .net will lose you traffic. If someone has your desired name with .com so that you use any other TLD, you will lose traffic. If your .com is taken by someone in the same line of work and not just a coincidental use of the same domain, then you'd be insane to not change the domain. I'm not sure how many people manually type domains in any more (I do though), and .com is muscle memory.
- scarab92 2y agoSure, it's a natural monopoly, but it's owned by a non-profit (ICAAN), so where is all the money going?
- fc417fc802 2y agoIf a system is built in a way that creates a monopoly I'm not sure it's legitimate to refer to it as "natural". The characteristic that defines natural monopolies is that there's no realistic (at least known) alternative way to go about things which isn't also a monopoly.
- DoctorOW 2y agoOnly $0.18 goes to ICANN, the non-profit. The rest goes to the Verisign which is a publicly traded for-profit company which ultimately gets that $9.59. I bring this up because it of course _doesn't_ cost that much. Incidentally, Verisign posted $1.56 billion in revenue last year and spent about $1.21 billion on stock buybacks in the same time.
- cship2 2y agoOr had to get an isdn line just to get an static ip for your clients to ftp the files