Free Website Hosting UK
Free Website Hosting UK
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies 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 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
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 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 some opening up of internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to do this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a site 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 pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 web site interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly 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 products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site requires a more expanded package that supplies 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
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 sites. Usually, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for a few reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client generally doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 website server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer expects they will consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole server located in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully 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 wonderful way to get 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 kinds of hosting supplied 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 website 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 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime stats. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer should 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 offer 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 user may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a potential client and can be a major item when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different 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.