Free Personal Website Hosting
Free Personal Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide 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 tiny 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 website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to manage this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a site 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 world wide web increased, the demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web 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 large companies that are not internet service providers need to be constantly 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 internet-based orders.
A complex site will have a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow clients to develop 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared web hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to become web 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 great deal in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be chosen for different reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for patching 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 has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, many colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 website might be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Also, 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 permits providers to charge users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or more websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick method to keep 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting provided 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 might also offer an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 at times 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 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. 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime info. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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 supply 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 web hosting customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user 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 does not have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet security is a vital concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major item when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.