The Best Free Website Hosting And Domain
The Best Free Website Hosting And Domain
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website 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 supply 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 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 small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to complete this, web site hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for companies, both large 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 most basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, generally 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 sometimes has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site 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 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 web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of website 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 differentiate a lot 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be wanted for different reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and gets 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 generally 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 it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer guesses they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control on where their information is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few 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 try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A quick way 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 points 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 may also supply 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 site 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. Quite 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 at times provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering web 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. a lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer might want to obtain 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 customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages often include a web 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 which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is super important to a possible client and can be a major item when considering which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.