Best Free Website Hosting Cnet
Best Free Website Hosting Cnet
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website hosts can also offer 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to complete this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a site 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 internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly 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 supply details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site demands a more inclusive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
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 sites. Generally, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website organizations often 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 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 differentiate a great deal 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user sometimes does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally 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 is not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user 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 user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their user's server, 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 number of colocation providers would allow any system 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 allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions 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 only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole computer located in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A good way to have 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied 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 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 site 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime stats. Many 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer needs 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer 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 web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, online security is an important topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a possible client and can be a major item when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. 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.