Top Website Hosting 2018
Top Website Hosting 2018
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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 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 written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website 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 website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to do this, web site hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and sometimes 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 at times has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big 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 organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site requires a more comprehensive 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 develop 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Typically, 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following 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 supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may 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 typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user sometimes doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically 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 user gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not given full 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 usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user 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 accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can compensate 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 decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client assumes they might use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively try to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick way to keep 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied 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 might 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 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime information. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times supplied as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website 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 customer might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is a vital topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is super important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. 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.