Good Cheap Website Hosting
Good Cheap Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to complete this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called 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 website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both big 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 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, generally 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 often has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website calls for 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 clients to create 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 quite a bit 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 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for different reasons, which includes 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 usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support 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 his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user expects they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options 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
Typically, a sole computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick method to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 website pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host can 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 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime information. Quite a number 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. Many hosting providers offer Linux-based web 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 web hosting customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a very important concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service offers is very important to a possible client and can be a major subject when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.