1 Dollar Website Hosting
1 Dollar Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web hosts can also supply data center space and connectivity to the internet for other servers located in their data center, called colocation, also known as Housing in Latin America or France.
History
Up till 1991, the internet was restricted to use only "...for research and education in the sciences and engineering..." and was used for email, telnet, FTP and USENET traffic, but only a small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to users. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, generally supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site needs a more inclusive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow clients to create or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for sites that wish to keep the data transmitted more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this kind of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared web hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for varying reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single computer located in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A quick method to have a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting offered by web host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not website pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host can also supply an interface or control panel for managing the web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes referred to as a "headless" server. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce, blogs, etc.).
Reliability and Uptime
The availability of a site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly accessible and reachable via the internet. This differs from measuring the uptime of a system. Uptime refers to the system itself being online. Uptime does not take into account being able to reach it during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is at times not included in the SLA timeframe and needs to be subtracted from the Total Time when availability is calculated. Depending on the wording of an SLA, if the availability of a system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what type of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, online security is a very important topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major component when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.