Best Free Ecommerce Website Hosting
Best Free Ecommerce Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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
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 till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was challenging 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 budget or experience to complete this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website 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 options allow clients to create 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared web hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of web 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 quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply 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 split up in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be chosen for different reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web 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 usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 customer gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, many colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits 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
Usually, a sole server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to get a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update 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 website pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host might 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 web server that does not 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 available 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Quite a few 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
Website hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client is encouraged 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 offer 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 user may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer 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 generally include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, web security is an important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a prospective client and can be a major point when considering which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.