Google Free Website Hosting
Google Free Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization 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' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, 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 internet grew, the pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to users. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal website 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 organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly 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 internet-based orders.
A complicated website needs 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 programs 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 manage web servers. The scope of website 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 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and website organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a fair amount 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for a number of reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients 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 user gets their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin 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 website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer 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 user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer 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 support directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, 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 compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client assumes they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual machine located in a private home can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy method to keep 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 types of hosting offered 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 provide an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 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 certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime information. Many 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
Website hosting is at times supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs to 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 website hosting which offers 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 client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a vital worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible customer and can be a major component when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.