A Trip Down Memory Lane with GoDaddy, Bluehost & HostGator

Every company has a beginning and here we are going to take a trip down memory lane and find out how three of the most popular web hosting companies of today website looked like when they first launched.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine (a tool from Internet Archive that takes regular snapshots of websites as far back as 1996), we can go back to the very beginning of GoDaddy, HostGator and Bluehost see what their websites looked like and what they offered.

Contents

1 GoDaddy
2 Bluehost
3 HostGator

GoDaddy

GoDaddy (read our review) was the first of the three to launch a website offering web hosting services. The earliest snapshot of their site in the Wayback Machine is from November 27, 1999. Here is how their homepage looked like:

A closer look at some of the features GoDaddy offered back then reveal that their monthly pricing hasn’t changed much, from $9.95/mo (seems very competitive back then) but the disk space of 50 MB (yes that’s MEGAbyte) and the monthly data transfer, or bandwidth, of 1.5 GB are light years behind today’s standard (normally today, both of these are unlimited).

Bluehost

Bluehost (read our review) was the second one out of the three. The earliest record of their site in the Wayback Machine is from March 3, 2000. Here is how their homepage looked like:

As with GoDaddy, Bluehost’s monthly pricing back in 2000 is pretty much on par with today, but 20 MB disk Space 1 GB bandwidth are far off what Bluehost offers today.

HostGator

Last out of was HostGator (read our review), their site in the Wayback Machine is from November 21, 2002. Here is how their homepage looked like:

HostGator’s famous logo was there from the absolute beginning. HostGator’s Baby Croc plan in 2002 started at $9.90 per month, offered 500 MB of disk space and 15 GB of monthly data transfer.