Best Value Website Hosting UK
Best Value Website Hosting UK
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations 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 provide 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 small number of web 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 greater internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to achieve this, web site hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a site 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 internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web 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 website orders.
A complex site needs a more comprehensive 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 clients to create 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to become website 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 supply 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 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 sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for a few reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user generally doesn't 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 customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their customer's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the customer assumes they may use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A good way 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered 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 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 at times 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 website 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 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 computers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime information. 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 at times provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. a lot of hosting providers provide 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 web hosting user may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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 concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is very important to a prospective client and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.