Best Website Hosting For Small Business Cnet
Best Website Hosting For Small Business Cnet
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their website available 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. 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 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 access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to manage this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 web interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website will have a more comprehensive 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 develop 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 web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Typically, 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 at times sell shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide 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 affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate quite a bit 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 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for different reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are often 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 his or her own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user generally doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often 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 user gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user 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 expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 lot of colocation providers would allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client assumes they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control on where their information 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 servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A quick opportunity to get 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 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 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 website server that does not 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime info. Many 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally offered as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should 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 provide Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 website hosting user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is an extreme item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a potential client and can be a major topic when deciding which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.