Free Com Website Hosting
Free Com Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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
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 web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to achieve this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite 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 minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times 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 in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site demands 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 clients to develop 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows 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 differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a few reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user sometimes does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 user gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they may use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide clients less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known 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 types of hosting supplied 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 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 doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is often 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 each 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime info. A number 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a complete 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 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 web hosting user may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer 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 at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, internet security is a very important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a potential customer and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.