Cheapest Website Hosting UK
Cheapest Website Hosting UK
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer 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 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 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 some opening up of internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to complete this, web site hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to design 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 big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb 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 minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website 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 large companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently 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 provide details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website needs a more expanded package that supplies 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this kind of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 supply a similar 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for varying 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 typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client sometimes doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over it (the customer 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 customer is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their customer's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user assumes they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally 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, a single server situated in a private home can be used to host one or more sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A quick method to get a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 offered by website 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 may 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 web server that doesn't 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 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 certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime info. A number of 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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 lot of hosting providers supply Linux-based web 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 website hosting client might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, internet security is a very important issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a potential customer and can be a major item when deciding which provider a customer should choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, including 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.