Get Free Website Hosting
Get Free Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations 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 customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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 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 browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to achieve this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 increased, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, often 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 at times has a greater expense 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website will have a more inclusive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for varying reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically does not own the server. One type 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 client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 require 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 site may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures 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 customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client assumes they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give users less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied by website 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 could also offer 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 doesn't 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 available 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime info. A lot of 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
Web hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client must 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. a lot of hosting providers supply Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client 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 at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme concern. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major point when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted 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, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.