Best Website Hosting Companies 2016
Best Website Hosting Companies 2016
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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 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 put together and not till 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 complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to achieve this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop 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 internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often 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 permanently 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 website orders.
A complex website will have a more comprehensive 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 customers 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a lot 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 offer 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 split up in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for varying reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can 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 granting the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's server, providing only 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 expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user thinks they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give customers less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual computer situated in a private residence 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 older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known way to attain 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied by website 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 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 often 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 website is publicly accessible 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) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime information. 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number 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. Most hosting providers offer 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 might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a very important topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users 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.