Free Cloud Server For Website Hosting
Free Cloud Server For Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations 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 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to manage this, web hosting services began to provide services 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 develop a site 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 world wide web grew, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater 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 permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site calls for 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 programs allow clients to write 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for a few reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally 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 customer gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin 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 his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the client 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 tools. The customer is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their user'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 visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate 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 not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer assumes they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A great opportunity to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds 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 could 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 web 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly available and reachable via the internet. This is different 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer needs 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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 components.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is a very important concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a possible customer and can be a major consideration when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users 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.