Compare Website Hosting Providers
Compare Website Hosting Providers
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 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 until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was complicated 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, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a site 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 increased, the demand for companies, both big 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 simple 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 very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and often 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 investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site needs 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 facilities allow clients 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 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 websites to hundreds of sites. Typically, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up 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 wanted for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers 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 customer gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 user gets his or her own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 site might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer guesses they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits 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
Generally, a sole machine placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied by website 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 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) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers provide uptime information. A lot 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer should 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user 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. Web hosting packages at times include a website 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 belonging to their customers, online security is an important topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a potential client and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a client should choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.