Top Ten Website Hosting Companies
Top Ten Website Hosting Companies
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website accessible 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 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
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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to complete this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to create 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 grew, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and generally 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 investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations 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 offer details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website needs a more inclusive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow customers to write 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 web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 differentiate quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the tech 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 may be chosen for a number of reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user sometimes does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 customer gets their own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their client's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their 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 hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user expects they will consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A great opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 types of hosting provided 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 can also supply an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web server that doesn't 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 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime stats. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A typical 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 customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer 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 website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is an important concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major item when considering which supplier a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.