Free Website Hosting Reviews 2014
Free Website Hosting Reviews 2014
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies 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 users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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
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 till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to manage this, web site hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and sometimes 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 often has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website needs 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 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found 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 that are available with this type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared website hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is 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 shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for different reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user often doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted 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 issues. The customer sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable 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 decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client guesses they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building 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 many options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a single server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy 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 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 might 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 web server that does not 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 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. The scheduled downtime is often 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times supplied 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 provides a wide range of various software. A typical 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 might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, web security is a very important item. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major component when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.