Best Cheap Website Hosting
Best Cheap Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website hosts can also provide 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 limited 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 put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to achieve this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and generally 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 often has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site will have 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 clients to write 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared web hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech 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 generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for a few reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client often does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their client's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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, many colocation providers would accept 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 relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy 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 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 can also provide 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 at times 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 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 per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is often excluded from 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime information. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer is encouraged to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Many hosting providers supply 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 website hosting client might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital item. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a possible customer and can be a major item when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.