Free Single Page Website Hosting
Free Single Page Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide 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 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 web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to achieve this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also known as 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 grew, the demand for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. People and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and at times 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 at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website requires a more inclusive 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 write 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other sites, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared website hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working 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 nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for varying reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as 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 server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows 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 computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power failures 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 invoice users only for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat fee for the amount the user thinks they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common method to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change 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 website 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 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 generally 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 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime info. Quite a number 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often offered as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. 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 type of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. A number of hosting providers provide 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 website hosting customer might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, internet security is a very important issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is quite important to a possible client and can be a major item when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.