The year 2009 is officially over, and now we can look back at some of the interesting events that took place, regarding web hosting.

There’s no doubt that the major issue of 2009 in web hosting was security threats – spam, phising scams, scripts and hacks were very common, and hit some of the major web hosting services.

Although spam levels are down from this same time last year, spammers and bot creators continued to harass the Internet Many more institutions  and authorities are picking up the fight and are actively attempting to counter the botnet threat, in one way or another.

The competition between web hosting providers grew hotter in 2009. As the demand for cheap web hosting services grew, the prices went down, and hosting services went for as cheap as $1.99 per month.

According to webhosting.info, the fastest growing domain registrar is GoDaddy, followed by xinnet.com and onamae.com.

Web hosting services such as FatCow showed an impressive growth. iPage is also one of the fastest growing hosting services of 2009.

This year also saw the end of one of the first hosting services of the internet - Geocities. After 15 years of offering people the ability to set up their own website, Geocities has closed down for good. Yahoo acquired Geocities for 3.57 billion U.S. dollars in 1999. Geocities sites are no longer be accessible, but some pages will still be accessible via the  Internet Archive project.

2009 was a very good year for open source CMS. WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal has won the inaugural Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. With this award, Drupal has won two categories this year, the other one being Best Open Source PHP CMS.

Technology-wise, the original promise of cloud computing is finally being realized and implemented by both consumers and businesses thanks to advances in hosting software and technology. The developments in the web hosting arena are quickly meeting the needs of individuals and businesses, and paving the way for more exciting technologies and features.

Back in the 90s there was really only one way to build a site for free – that was Geocities. This service, hosted by Yahoo, once boasted millions of users. New hosting technologies and cheap hosting prices have caused Geocities’ popularity to decline over the years.

A few days ago, after 15 years of offering people the ability to set up their own website, Geocities has closed down for good. Yahoo acquired Geocities for 3.57 billion U.S. dollars in 1999 , though the site had been operating since 1994. Yahoo said sites would no longer be accessible from 26th October. However, some pages will still be accessible via the  Internet Archive project.

Many technology sites covered the closure of Geocities. Some, like the comics site XKCD, have made different tributes, in honor of the old web service.

Geocities was a good idea at the beginning of the days of the internet, but nowadays, building a website or blog is cheap and easy for anyone to do, without the need for web programming skills. Even more sophisticated websites for e-commerce and business applications for sales and customer management are available at reasonable prices for small business owners.