Free Website Hosting Squarespace
Free Website Hosting Squarespace
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or capability to achieve this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct 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 world wide web grew, the demand for organizations, both large and small, 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 basic is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, generally 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 generally has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website needs a more comprehensive 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared web hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working 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 computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for different reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally 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 client has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, many colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user guesses they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control on where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. 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 lot of benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 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 might also provide an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 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 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is often 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime statistics. Many 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
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. Most hosting providers offer 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 user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a potential client and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a customer should choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.