Free Ecommerce Website Hosting
Free Ecommerce Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, 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 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 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, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to achieve this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both big 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 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web in order to 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 internet-based orders.
A complex website needs a more comprehensive package that offers 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 sites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
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. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared website hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following 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 supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech 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 shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be wanted for a few reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user often 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 client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any server 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 modern type of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single 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 charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they may consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give users less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try 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 common method to get 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting offered by website host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not website pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host might 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 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 below 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 reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Many 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 at times supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client must 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 provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 client might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user 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 generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a vital issue. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major point when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different 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.