Completely Free Website Hosting
Completely Free Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website 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. 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till 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 convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to manage this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to build a site 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 internet increased, the demand for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and sometimes 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 often has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large 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 supply details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website calls for 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 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 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 website is placed 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 type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously 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 technical 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 shared hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for a number of reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 customer gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type 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 alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, 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 bill users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client thinks they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 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 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 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 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 servers. The 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display 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
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a complete 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 kind 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 web hosting client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also choose 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. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is a vital concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is quite important to a potential client and can be a major point when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.