Free Social Website Hosting
Free Social Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to do this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally 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 big organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site needs a more comprehensive 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 sites 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 site is placed 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 available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed 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 offer 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for varying reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin 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 web 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 may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their customer's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client expects they might consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide customers less control on where their information is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website 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 benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy way to attain 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied 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 might also provide 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client needs 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 supply Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 website hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business 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 customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is an important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major topic when considering which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.