Best Website Hosting Services In India
Best Website Hosting Services In India
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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
Until 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to manage this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop a website 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 world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 site interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and at times 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 generally has a greater 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 constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site will have a more comprehensive 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 type of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed 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 supply 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for a few reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically 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 website server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often 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 customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control 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 allowing the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web 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 users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more sites 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 residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A wonderful method to have a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 kinds of hosting provided by web 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 might also provide an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is often 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 website 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) may include a specific 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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. a lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based web 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 client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization 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 customer 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 components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is a vital topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is quite important to a potential customer and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different 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.