Best Free Website Hosting Sites
Best Free Website Hosting Sites
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website 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 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
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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created 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 availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to complete this, web site hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a website 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 grew, the demand for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. 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 website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, 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 companies that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site will have a more inclusive package that supplies 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 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 sometimes provide shared website hosting and web companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical 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 does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 client gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any server 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 new kind of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give users less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web 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 acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual computer located in a private residence can be used to host one or more websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common way 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 offered 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 can also provide 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 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 website 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 as in the event of a 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 systems. 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime info. Quite a number of 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. 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 kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 user may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business 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 sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a possible client and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server 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 various reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.