Best Website Hosting Reviews
Best Website Hosting Reviews
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that supply 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 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together 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 access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to do this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is awebsite 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 minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally 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 big organizations that are not ISPs 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site calls for 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 supply 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 does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for different reasons, which includes the ability to relocate 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 supply server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes 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 admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A great method to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 types of hosting provided 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 can also supply 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 at times 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 available 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Quite a number of 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client must 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, web security is a vital topic. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is very important to a prospective client and can be a major item when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted 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.