Free Website Hosting With Free Domain Name
Free Website Hosting With Free Domain Name
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 provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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
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 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 additional internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to do this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for companies, 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 simple 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and generally 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 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 permanently connected to the web so they can 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 website orders.
A complicated website requires a more expanded package that offers 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites 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 kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 differentiate 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 provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. 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 admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer 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 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 customer gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer 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 type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator go to 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 insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows clients 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 servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. 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 permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control on where their information is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole server situated in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work 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 good method to have 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting provided by web 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 may also supply 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 generally 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 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 when there is a 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 at times 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should 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 supply Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 website hosting customer may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, web security is a vital topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is super important to a prospective customer and can be a major point when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.