Free Sports Website Hosting
Free Sports Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website hosts can also supply 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to do this, web site hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as 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 internet grew, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes 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 ISPs 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 provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website demands a more inclusive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow customers 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 web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared website hosting and web companies at times have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated 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 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 handed out in a way that does not 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 wanted for different reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client 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 user 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 client gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not permitted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website 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 server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer thinks they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often 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 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 located in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to have 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 provided 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 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 website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 available 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. Quite a few 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 general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web 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 different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting customer 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 user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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 parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is an important issue. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The amount 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 client should choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.