In These Times

I’m an IT manager supporting internetworking infrastructure for online web hosting providers in the small business and consumer markets. My clients include leading internet hosting companies such as 1and1 Internet, hostgator, fatcow hosting, EasyCGI Hosting, and midPhase hosting. Internetworking technologies have come a long way since the early 1990’s. The first networks utilized by leading web hosting providers including bluehost and 1and1 (1&1) were time-sharing networks that used mainframes and attached terminals. Such environments were implemented by both IBM’s System Network Architecture (SNA) and Digital Digital’s network architecture. Local area networks (LANs) evolved around the PC revolution where hosting providers like EasyCGI.  LANs enabled multiple users in a relatively small geographical area to exchange files and messages, as well as access shared resources such file servers. Wide-area networks (WAN) interconnect LANs across normal telephone lines (and other media), thereby interconnecting geographically dispersed users. Today, high-speed LANs, WANs and switched internetworks are becoming widely used throughout the webhosting industry, largely because they operate at very high speeds and support such high-bandwidth applications as gaming, voice and videoconferencing.