Free HTML Website Hosting
Free HTML Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site available 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. Website hosts can also supply 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 limited 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till 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 challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to do this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' sites 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 known as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. 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 website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often 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 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 to 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 online orders.
A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that supplies 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 create 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 web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located 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 at times make available shared web hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client usually 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 user 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 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 software. The client is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client often does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides 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 supply little to no assistance directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that allows 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 computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power outages 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 invoice users just for resources used by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user assumes they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual server located in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known method to attain 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 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime information. Most 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer must evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based website 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 customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, web security is an important item. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a potential client and can be a major topic when deciding which supplier a client will choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.