Best Free Website Hosting Canada
Best Free Website Hosting Canada
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
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 small 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 more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, web hosting services started to provide services 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 websites, also known as 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 web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website 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 internet service providers 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site will have a more expanded package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow customers to develop 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 differentiate a fair amount 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 tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for different reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer sometimes doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer expects they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual machine located in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 offered by website 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 could 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 doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is often 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 website 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime statistics. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client must 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 offer Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various 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 have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user 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 worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet security is an extreme item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a possible customer and can be a major component when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.