Best Free Website Hosting For Photographers
Best Free Website Hosting For Photographers
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies 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 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established 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 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 experience to complete this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. 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 web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and generally 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 generally 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 constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website 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 options allow customers to create 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 varies greatly.
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 websites. Usually, 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website 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 following types of hosting, depending on who they are working 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 supply a similar 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may 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 giving the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The customer typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that allows customers 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 an individual piece of hardware fails. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control on where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A wonderful method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 web 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 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 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 generally will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each 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 internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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. A number of hosting providers supply 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 website hosting user may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is a very important issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a potential client and can be a major topic when deciding which provider a customer should choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.