Cheap Website Hosting Companies
Cheap Website Hosting Companies
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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 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 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 access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to manage this, web site hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct 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 grew, the pressure for organizations, both large 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 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. People and organizations may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website needs 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 facilities 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website 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 kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a fair amount 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 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 handed out 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 might be chosen for different reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 their own website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the client 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 software. The client is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator visit 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 require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client thinks they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website 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 multiple options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual server located in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick opportunity 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 directs 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 could 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 doesn't 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 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) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is often 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime statistics. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally 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 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. Most hosting providers supply Linux-based web 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 client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might 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. Website hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is a very important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a customer should choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.