Free Group Website Hosting
Free Group Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website 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, usually 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 web 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 increased internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to complete this, web site hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the web 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 pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site calls for a more inclusive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow customers 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 placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Typically, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate quite a bit 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 supply the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for a few reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web 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 kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes 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 customer gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage 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 granting the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of 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 modern kind of hosting platform that permits users strong, 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 take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user assumes they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. 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 number of pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole 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 machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered by web 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 can 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 generally 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime info. Quite a few 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
Web hosting is at times supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should 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 offer Linux-based website 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 web hosting customer may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website 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
Since web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is an extreme issue. When a customer 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 website. The amount of security that a website hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major subject when considering which supplier a client will choose.
Web hosting computers 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.