Best Website Hosting Plans
Best Website Hosting Plans
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web 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
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 written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to complete this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build 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 world wide web increased, the demand for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to subscribers. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site needs 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 options 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other websites, 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 that are available with this type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to take on the role of website 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 differentiate a great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer 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 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, however, virtualization may be wanted for different reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client usually 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 client 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 the server (the customer 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 customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The customer typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client expects they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A quick opportunity 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered 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 can also provide 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 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 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 computers. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime statistics. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client 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. Many hosting providers supply Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 web hosting customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user 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 web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is a very important issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a potential client and can be a major topic when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.