Free Python Website Hosting
Free Python Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply 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 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to achieve this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 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 simplest 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater 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 constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website requires a more inclusive package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow customers to write 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 differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 provide shared website hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate tremendously 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 provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is 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 doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for varying reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing 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 his or her own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user 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 client 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 client gets their own website server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web 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 computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their customer's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user assumes they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give users less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website 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 clients).
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 server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 offered 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 can also offer 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 doesn't 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly accessible and reachable via the internet. This differs 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 as in the event of a 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 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 often will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime information. Quite a few 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. a lot of hosting providers supply Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a potential customer and can be a major topic when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.