Free Website Hosting With MySQL Database
Free Website Hosting With MySQL Database
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 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 website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, 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 budget or capability to achieve this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a website 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 internet increased, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied 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 web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website needs 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 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 manage 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 websites. Usually, 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become 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 tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be chosen for a few reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user generally doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 they are not allowed full control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer 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 client often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any server 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 modern 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 others since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer expects they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, an individual server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common way to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 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 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly accessible 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 per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers provide uptime info. 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 often offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client must 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, web security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is very important to a potential client and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a customer should choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious users 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.