Free Php Website Hosting And Domain
Free Php Website Hosting And Domain
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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
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 put together and not until 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 complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to manage this, website hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a site 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 increased, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 site interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different 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 website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website will have 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 facilities allow clients to create 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Usually, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 vary a lot 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
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for a few reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The 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 supply server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically 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 user gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. 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 server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures 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 consumed by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client expects they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual machine placed in a private home can be used to host one or more sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common 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 types of hosting offered 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 can also supply an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web server that doesn't 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each 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 generally will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers provide uptime info. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often supplied as part of a general 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 website hosting customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer 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 generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, web security is an important concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.