Free Non Profit Website Hosting
Free Non Profit Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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 small number of web 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 more internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to complete this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website 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 big companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web so they can 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 complicated 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 programs allow clients to develop 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located 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 available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 vary 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 offer 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 doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for a number of reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. The 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 offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 customer gets their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support 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 his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power outages 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 invoice users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer assumes they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a single machine situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common method 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 types of hosting provided 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 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 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime stats. Quite a number of 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
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client is encouraged to 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is a very important topic. 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 site. The amount of security that a website hosting service offers is quite important to a prospective client and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a client should choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.