How much was web stuff when you first started?

I started in '97 and I paid $69.95 or $70.00 per domain (2 years) to Network Solutions. Network Solutions was the first company that sold domains, and they were the sole provider until 1998. I never finished developing my first few sites --> I do remember I was not paying much monthly for hosting though, and I was using way too many animated .gifs on my sites. I also remember purchasing some sweet web templates for maybe $60-$90 each that got me going in the right direction.

I finally got serious on the web in 2002...prior to then I had bounced around several F'd up shared hosts on cheap reseller accounts... Heck, once I even tried a server across the pond. Finding a good host in those days was not an easy task.

I found what I believe to be one of the best in the business, Hostdime, in 2002 and I am still with them today. I grabbed a reseller account for 30 bucks a month with plenty or resources and went to work. Unfortunately for me, I taught myself Drupal ...a decision that still haunts me today. The foundation of almost all my best sites were built with open source stuff...Drupal and Gallery2. Unfortunately, Wordpress was not released until 2003...and by then I had already taught myself Drupal and the hacks I needed.. I rolled with old Drupal and G2 installs until 2015 and that's when I decided that I couldn't take it anymore and made one of the hardest decisions of my life, knock the sites down and switch them to Wordpress.

In 2005 I built a Hurricane Katrina site about 4 days before it hit, I knew it was going to be a massive disaster and I wanted to document it ---> the site was drawing up to 450,000 page views a day after the storm hit and my image based site loaded the shared server badly.

Both Hostdime and I agreed it was time to move up. They wanted me to try a VPS for I think about $80 a month but not a single site would load...we pretty much knew it had no chance, but gave it a go anyway.

So in 2005 traffic forced me to lease my first fully managed dedicated server, a P4, at I think $199-$229 or so a month. Eventually reduced to around $140 a month.

About 2010 or so the P4 started to fail me so I moved to a fully managed i3 for $179-$199 a month. Eventually reduced to around $135 a month.

In 2014 I upgraded to a fully managed E3-1230 setup that ran about $329 monthly retail...I was paying roughly $235 because I demanded a loyalty discount. I'd been with the company since basically the beginning, and by this time they had grown into a global powerhouse.

In 2015 I made a financial power play and told Hostdime I may move all of my sites to three shared hosting accounts with another company. I eventually put in a discontinue service notice on the server to force their hand...they immeadiately wanted to negotiate more to my terms. It was a grueling negotiation but I came out smelling like a rose.

I committed to at least one year at $120 a month on my config that is leasing for $244 a month today. Hostdime very rarely gives substantial discounts, but when you have paid a great company with great service, for that many years, they can and will sometimes make exceptions. The year has past and my rate is the same...

Prior to 1995 domain names were free.

Personally, I liked it a lot better back in the days when the entry bar was much higher.

Cheers

-don

I had my first website 10 years ago and the prices were pretty much the same as they are now for hosting and domain names. Since then, I have registrered dozens of domain names and switched between 3 hosting providers.

Back in those days, making money online was much easier. We just had to post a few articles and classified ads and we had sales coming in. I miss those lazy ways of making money.