Free Basic Website Hosting
Free Basic Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website accessible 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
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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established 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 confused 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 complete this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop 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 internet grew, the demand for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 web site interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. People and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and generally 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 sometimes has a higher expense 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 organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website demands a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow clients 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. 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 make available shared website hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be website 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 a great deal 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 supply 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a number of reasons, which includes the ability to move 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 supply server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer often doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server but they are 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 software. The client is not given full 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 often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. 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 machine, 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, 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 invoice users only for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A great way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 provided 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 offer an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly available 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 each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is often 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime statistics. A lot of 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged to 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 offer Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is an important topic. 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 website. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major component when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.