Best Free Website Hosting For Teachers
Best Free Website Hosting For Teachers
A website 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 provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was confused 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 money or capability to complete this, web site hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website requires 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 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 differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 kind of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated 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 similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide 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 underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for a few reasons, including the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and has full 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 sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 customer gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web 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 takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits clients 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 a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a single machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to have 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 provided 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 may 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 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. 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
Web hosting is often offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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 number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, online security is an important topic. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a possible customer and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.