Best Free Website Hosting Review
Best Free Website Hosting Review
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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 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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until 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 complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to do this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct 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 internet grew, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, often 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 sometimes has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers 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 products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website needs 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 facilities allow clients to develop 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 a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found 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 that are available with this type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 vary a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply 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 doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for a number of reasons, including the option to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user typically does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically 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 user gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete 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 software. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his 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 companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user expects they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website 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 variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A great opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 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 may 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 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 accessible 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 computers. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Most 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot 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. Many hosting providers supply Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user 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. Web hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, online security is a very important item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a possible customer and can be a major subject when deciding which provider a client should choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.