Cheap Website Hosting In Nigeria
Cheap Website Hosting In Nigeria
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also supply 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site 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, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to do this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create 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 grew, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, generally supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher 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 so they can 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 online orders.
A complicated site demands 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 programs allow customers to create 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, 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 that are available with this kind of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech 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 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, however, virtualization may be done for a few reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually 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 user gets their own website server and has 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 usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin 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 is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage 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 permitting the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website 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 costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their user's server, 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, many colocation providers would allow any computer 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 allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user thinks they may use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide users less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, an individual machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great opportunity to get 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 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 might also provide an interface or control panel for managing the web 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 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime statistics. Many 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 generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client should 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 offer 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 website hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, web security is an important issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is super important to a potential client and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.