Free Website Hosting Services Google
Free Website Hosting Services Google
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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 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 till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to achieve this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to subscribers. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often 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 often has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website requires 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 customers 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Typically, 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 sometimes provide shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to be web 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 vary a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated 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, but, virtualization may be wanted for a number of reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users might 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 supply server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user usually does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative 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 website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user guesses they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of users).
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 computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update 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 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 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 site 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide 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 release uptime information. A lot 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 generally provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 customer may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, web security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a prospective client and can be a major component when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.