Free Website Hosting For Teachers
Free Website Hosting For Teachers
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer 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 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
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 established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to complete this, website hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a site that would be hosted on the web 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 big 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 aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and at times 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 sometimes 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 permanently connected to the web in order to 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 site requires a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow customers to develop 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 web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this kind of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared web hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 a lot 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 computer's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for a number of reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may 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 administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client 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 their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance 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 his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any computer 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 modern 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 reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic 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 thinks they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy method to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 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 may 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 website server that does not 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client needs 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 web 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 user might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose 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. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is a vital topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a potential client and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.