Top Website Hosting Companies
Top Website Hosting Companies
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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 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
Up till 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 created 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 availability, 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 organizations had the budget or expertise to do this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the web 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 big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 website interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher 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 to 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 online orders.
A complicated site 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 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other sites, 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 that are available with this kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working 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 provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer 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 split up 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 may be chosen for a number of reasons, including the option to move a VPS container between servers. The 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 administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client usually does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often 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 his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage 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 customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client'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 number of colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages 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 only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer expects they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of users).
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 single server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common method to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 offered 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 could also provide an interface or control panel for managing the web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers produce uptime information. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each 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 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 lot of hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, online security is an extreme issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major item when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.