Best Website Hosting Canada
Best Website Hosting Canada
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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
Until 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 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 availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to manage this, web site hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design 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 pressure for companies, both large and small, 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 simple 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times 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 often has a higher expense 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 in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website demands a more expanded 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 clients to write 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 greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Usually, 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared web hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for a number of reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might 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 supply server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer typically does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full admin 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 they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively 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 may be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, 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 invoice users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client expects they will consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options 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
Often, a single server situated in a private home can be used to host one or more websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt 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 easy opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL directs 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 could 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 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 website 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different 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 allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client needs to 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also prefer 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 sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is an extreme concern. 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 site. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is super important to a potential customer and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different 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 information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.