Cheap Website Hosting And Domain UK
Cheap Website Hosting And Domain UK
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website 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. Web hosts can also provide 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations 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 configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. People and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, sometimes 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 often has a greater expense 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 so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website will have 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 develop or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. Also, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is typically used for sites that wish to keep the data transmitted more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, 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 type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared website hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech 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 does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for a number of reasons, which includes the possibility 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 offer server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user generally 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 customer 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 user gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his 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 organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known method to keep 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 can 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 website 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime info. Most 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer is encouraged 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 provide Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is an extreme concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a potential client and can be a major item when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.