Replication was something you did when you got succesful enough to have it, or were a MSP providing it at premium to others.
Digg.com also had a really influential technical team - hearing about how they did things set a lot of baseline defaults for a lot of people.
Essentially, start at 2000-2001 and more and more people going into running websites for all kinds of reasons (forums, blogs, webshops, etc. often hosted on low end offerings)