Free Christian Website Hosting
Free Christian Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies 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 clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website hosts can also offer 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 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 web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to do this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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) provide this service free to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and sometimes 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 higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website requires a more comprehensive 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 customers to create 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 sometimes make available shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide 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 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 offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a few reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user usually does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 customer gets their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user thinks they will consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single server placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common method 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 offered 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 could 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged to 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. Most hosting providers supply 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 website hosting customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is an important issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is super important to a potential client and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.