Free Boy Scout Website Hosting
Free Boy Scout Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web 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. 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
Until 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 small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was convoluted 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 budget or expertise to achieve this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, generally supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater cost 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site calls for a more inclusive 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 write 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
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 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers 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 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 provide 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 server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be desired for a number of reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often 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 client gets their own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer sometimes doesn't 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 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 website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the customer thinks they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for better 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. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole computer located in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common opportunity to keep 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 kinds of hosting provided 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 could 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 at times 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) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime stats. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web 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 supply Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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 parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a vital concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious organizations in various 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.