Google Apps Free Website Hosting
Google Apps Free Website Hosting
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. Web hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 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 created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to do this, website hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for organizations, both big 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 simplest 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, 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 generally has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs 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 online orders.
A complex website will have a more comprehensive 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 customers 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 vary 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
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for a number of reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically 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 client gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer generally does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 user gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed 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 user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer 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 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 his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any computer 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 new 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 might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client thinks they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single machine situated 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 servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy way to have a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 types of hosting offered by website 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 could 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 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 site 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 as in the event of a 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 servers. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. 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. Many hosting providers offer 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 may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may 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 sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, web security is a vital worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a possible customer and can be a major component when considering which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.