Best Website Hosting For WordPress
Best Website Hosting For WordPress
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that supply 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 offer 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 small 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 web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to complete this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both big 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 most basic 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 almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and generally 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 generally has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web so they can 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 internet-based orders.
A complicated website will have a more inclusive 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 sites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to be 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 vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide 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 shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be chosen for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 user gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's machine, providing just 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, 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 require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of 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 web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A wonderful way to get 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 types of hosting provided 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 might also offer 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 does not 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 site 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 such as 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 systems. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided 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 is encouraged 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 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 customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a prospective customer and can be a major component when considering which provider a client should choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.