WordPress Website Hosting Cost
WordPress Website Hosting Cost
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not till 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 availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a website 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 internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations 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 web interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and at times 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 often has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large 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 offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website demands a more inclusive package that provides 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 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Usually, 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients 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 working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be wanted for a number of reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer often 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 user has full administrative 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 they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to 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 client to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's computer, 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, many colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client assumes they may use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, an individual server placed in a private residence 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 internet service providers actively 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 well-known way to get 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 kinds of hosting offered by web 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 may 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly accessible and reachable via the internet. This is different 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. 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 number of hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer 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 be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.