Best Website Hosting Packages
Best Website Hosting Packages
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations 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
Up till 1991, the internet was limited 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created 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 availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to manage this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd 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 web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand 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 most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various organizations 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 often has a higher 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 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 complicated site needs a more expanded 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 vary a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for varying reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user often doesn't 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 user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed 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 problems. The customer usually 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 customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits clients strong, 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 servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer expects they might 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 deal breaker for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole machine located in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 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 web 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 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 site is publicly available 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 when there is 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 computers. The scheduled downtime is generally not included in 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 offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime information. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer must 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client 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 be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, online security is an important item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is quite important to a prospective client and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.