Free Educational Website Hosting
Free Educational 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, typically in a data center. Web 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written 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 availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to complete this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 internet grew, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, generally 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 sometimes has a higher cost 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 in order 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 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 programs allow customers 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, 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 type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become website 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 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 supply 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 does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for a number of reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client generally 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 customer has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies 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 offer little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow 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 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 might be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, 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 invoice users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client guesses they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy way to have a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 supplied 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 provide 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 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 site is publicly accessible 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is sometimes not included in 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 at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes offered as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also prefer 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 doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is an important worry. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a potential client and can be a major subject when deciding which provider a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in different 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.