Website Hosting Prices South Africa
Website Hosting Prices South Africa
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web hosts can also provide 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 created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was complicated 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 companies had the money or capability to do this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. People and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, and often 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 greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site requires 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 customers to develop 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 website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 kind of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to take on the role of website 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 vary tremendously 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 technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't 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 few reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client usually does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their user's computer, providing only 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, many colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide clients less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs 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 great method to get 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered by website host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not web 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 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 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is often 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 at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. 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 lot of hosting providers supply 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 web hosting customer may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a vital concern. 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 site. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major consideration when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.