Free Sports Team Website Hosting
Free Sports Team Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available 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. Web hosts can also provide 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to do this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop 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 internet grew, the demand for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to subscribers. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site will have a more comprehensive 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate 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 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 does not 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 a few reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client usually 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 user has full administrative access to the server, which means the client 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 may 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 customer to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any server 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 modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user assumes they may consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having 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 a lot of pros 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
Typically, a single computer 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 machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick opportunity to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 kinds 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 might 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 does not 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 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 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 often will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers show uptime stats. Most hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web 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. a lot of hosting providers offer 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 web hosting user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is quite important to a possible customer and can be a major consideration when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.