Best Website Hosting And Domain
Best Website Hosting And Domain
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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 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 until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to achieve this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations 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 provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site will have a more inclusive 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 clients to write 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 kind of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of 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 tremendously 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 offer 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 split up in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for a few reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer 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 full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website 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 type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their customer's computer, providing only 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, many colocation providers would allow any server 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 modern type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, 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 stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, 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 fee for the amount the user guesses they will use, 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 worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website 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 options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual machine placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 web 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 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 website 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 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime information. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied 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 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based website 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 client might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may 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. Web hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a very important issue. When a client agrees to use a web 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 offers is quite important to a possible client and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a client will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.