The Best Website Hosting Service
The Best Website Hosting Service
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations 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 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
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 written and not until 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 availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to do this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a site 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 world wide web 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 offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often 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 constantly 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 supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website calls for a more expanded package that provides 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 write 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 differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, 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 that are available with this type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become web 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 great deal 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
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer 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); but, the user 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 client has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his 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 computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options 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
Generally, a sole server located in a private home can be used to host one or a number of websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful method to attain 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 kinds of hosting provided 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 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 website server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 available 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime statistics. 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 often provided as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client is encouraged 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 number of hosting providers supply Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 web hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user 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 worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme item. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a potential client and can be a major topic when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.