Best Affordable Website Hosting
Best Affordable Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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
Until 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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to complete this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to users. People and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site calls for a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for websites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 that are available with this kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for different reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full admin 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 their own website server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client expects they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a few sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied by web host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not web pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host may also offer an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is generally 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 website is publicly available and reachable via the internet. This is different 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime statistics. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should 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. a lot of hosting providers supply Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service offers is quite important to a possible customer and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.