Cheap Website Hosting WordPress
Cheap Website Hosting WordPress
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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
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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to achieve this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both big 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to subscribers. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, 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 at times 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 so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website requires 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 customers 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 website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared website hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become 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 tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer 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 split up in a way that doesn't 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 wanted for different reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally 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 customer gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (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 software. The user is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server 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 provide little to no support directly for their client's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power outages 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 consumed by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many 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 made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers 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 provide static IP addresses. A easy method to have a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied 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 can also supply 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly accessible 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 during 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 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every 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 ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer must 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 website hosting which offers 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 might want to have other services, such as email for their organization 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 customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital worry. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked 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 information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.