Best Website Hosting
Best Website Hosting
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. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to manage this, website hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, 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 internet increased, the demand 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 simplest 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly 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 products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website demands a more inclusive 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 more secure.
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 site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a lot 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 provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for a few reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client sometimes does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to 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 granting the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client'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 system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, 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 computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer thinks they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits 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
Sometimes, a single computer situated in a private home 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 older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A well-known 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 offered 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 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 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 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 when there is 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 at times 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer is encouraged to 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. Many hosting providers offer 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 organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user 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. Website hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is a vital issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a potential customer and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.