Free Professional Website Hosting
Free Professional Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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
Up till 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 established 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 convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to do this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for organizations, 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 simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and often 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 generally has a higher expense 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 in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site calls for 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 options 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 that are available with this type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working 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 offer 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't 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 chosen for different reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer usually 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 customer has full admin access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the client 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 user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer usually does not 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 supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the client assumes they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. 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 users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A good way to keep 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied 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 may also supply an interface or control panel for managing the web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is often 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 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 such as during 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 computers. The scheduled downtime is often 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 generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime info. Most 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 at times offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client must 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 different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user may 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 customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is an important topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is quite important to a prospective client and can be a major topic when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting computers 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, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.