Web hosting is a service that provides individuals, organizations and users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center. Graphic representation of the world wide web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). ... A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and communications equipment. ...

Service scope

The scopes of hosting services vary widely. The most basic is file hosting (or Web page hosting), where Web pages and other files can be uploaded via FTP or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with little processing. Many ISPs offer this service for free to their subscribers. People can also obtain Web page hosting from services such as GeoCities or Yahoo!. Web page hosting is typically free, advertisement sponsored, or cheap. A Web page or webpage is a resource on the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. ... To upload a file onto Wikipedia, see Special:Upload. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... An Internet service provider (ISP, also called Internet access provider) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. ... Yahoo! GeoCities logo Yahoo! GeoCities is a free webhosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet. ... Yahoo! Inc. ...

Web page hosting is generally sufficient only for personal home pages. A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provide database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP, Java, and ASP.NET). These facilities allow the customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. For e-commerce, SSL is also required. The host may also provide a Web interface (e.g. cPanel) for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. A personal web site is one used for informative or entertainment purposes, but not for commercial reasons. ... A database is an organized collection of data. ... PHP, short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is an open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. ... The Java platform is the name for a computing environment, or platform, from Sun Microsystems which can run applications developed using the Java programming language and set of development tools. ... ASP.NET is a set of web development technologies marketed by Microsoft. ... Gaia Online, the largest English language forum-based community as of April 2005 — powered by a modified version of phpBB. An Internet forum is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions, or the web application software used to provide the facility. ... Content management or CM is a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. ... Electronic commerce, e-commerce or ecommerce consists primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing, and servicing of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. ... SSL can mean more than one thing: Secure Sockets Layer, a communications protocol. ... Screenshot of cPanel cPanel (control panel) is a graphical web-based management tool, designed to make administration of web sites as easy as possible. ... The term web server can mean one of two things: A computer that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients, which are known as web browsers, and serving them web pages, which are usually HTML documents. ...

Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce). They are commonly used by larger companies to outsource network infrastructure to a hosting company.

Types of hosting

Hosting can be split up into several general types:

• Free hosting: just about all the free web hosting available is extremely limited when compared to paid hosting. Free web hosts generally require their own ads on your site, only allow web-based uploading and editing of your site, and have very tight disk space and traffic limits. Still, most people get their start via free web hosting.
• Image hosting: hosting only a few different formats of images. This type of hosting is often free and most require registrations. Most image hosts allow hotlinking, so that you can upload images on their servers and not waste space/bandwidth on yours.
• Shared hosting: one's Web site is placed on the same server as several hundred other sites. A problem with another site on the server can bring all of the sites down. Shared hosting also brings with it some restrictions regarding what exactly can be done, although these restrictions are nowhere near as restrictive as for free hosting.
• Clustered hosting: designed to eliminate the problems inherent with typical shared hosting infrastructures, it offers the benefits of a dedicated server, but at affordable shared hosting prices. This hosting technology platform provides customers with a “clustered” handling of security, load balancing, and necessary Web site resources. Resources are virtualized beyond the limits of one physical server and dynamic load balancing disperses traffic to ensure performance is optimal for all customer accounts.
• Reseller hosting: designed for those who want to become Web hosts themselves. One gets a large amount of space and bandwidth that can be divided up among as many sites as the user wants to put on his account. A reseller account is placed on the same server with other reseller accounts, just like with shared hosting but there are fewer accounts.
• Virtual Private Server (or Virtual Dedicated Server) hosting: Virtual Private Server technology enables one physical server to house several Virtual Environments which behave exactly like an isolated stand-alone server. This is often a much more affordable solution than a dedicated server, normally offering all the same benefits, such as root access.
• Dedicated hosting: With dedicated hosting, one gets a server of one's own. They have no restrictions, except for those designed to maintain the integrity of the Web host's network (for instance, banning sites with adult content due to the increase risk of attack by crackers and grey legal issues for the ISP). Unless a separate plan is purchased from the host, the user is also generally on his own. This can be an expensive proposition, as the purchase of the dedicated server itself is generally far more expensive compared to shared hosting.
• Colocated hosting: This involves a server the user purchases himself and installs at the host's data center. Besides unmonitored reboots, the user must pay extra for many services dedicated hosting provides by default. Colocated hosting is generally chosen by people with server administration experience and those with more significant needs than which can be satisfied by dedicated or shared hosting. This is usually the most expensive and least cost effective option if you are not colocating many servers.
• File hosting: A service that focuses on hosting files such as shareware software, MP3s, games and videos.

Free web hosting is a service which provides users with the ability to store web sites and media on the Internet for no cost. ... Image hosting is a service that allows individuals to have the ability to upload different types of images to the Internet. ... Shared hosting is a form of web hosting where more than one web site is hosted on the same server. ... Clustered hosting technology is designed to eliminate the problems inherent with typical shared hosting infrastructures. ... Reseller hosting is a form of web hosting wherein the account owner may split up their alloted hard drive space and bandwidth and resell web hosting. ... In computing, Virtual private servers are a means of splitting a single physical server into multiple virtual servers. ... Dedicated hosting, also called dedicated server hosting, is a type of hosting that allows an organization to lease an entire server not shared with anyone. ... In military science, an attack is the aggressive attempt to conquer enemy territory, installations, personnel, or equipment or to deny the enemy the use of territory, installations, personnel, or equipment, for example by destroying the equipment. ... Cracker could refer to: Cracker, a type of biscuit Christmas cracker Computer cracker, sometimes incorrectly called a hacker Cracker, a British television series Cracker an American television series also known as Fitz. ... A colocation centre (colo) or carrier hotel is a type of data center where multiple telecommunications network or service providers, such as telcos or ISPs, site their connections to one anothers networks (points of presence). ... A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and communications equipment. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Shareware is a marketing method for software, whereby a trial version is distributed in advance and without payment, as is common for proprietary software. ... MP3 is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format invented and standardized in 1991 by a team of engineers working in the framework of the ISO/IEC MPEG audio committee under the chairmanship of Professor Hans Musmann (University of Hannover - Germany). ... Computer and video games A screenshot of Tetris for the Nintendo Game Boy A console game (better known as a video game) is a form of interactive multimedia used for entertainment, which consists of a moveable image displayed on a screen that is usually controlled and manipulated using a handheld...

Shared vs. dedicated IP

In shared IP hosting, several domain names are resolved to a single IP address. For example, both www.wikipedia.org and www.example.com might be hosted by a server located at 126.703.4.151. The requested domain name is included with the HTTP request to distinguish the requested resource. In dedicated IP hosting, each domain name is assigned an unique IP address, and the server makes no use of the domain name included with the request. Dedicated IP hosting does not preclude the use of shared server hosting, since several IP addresses can be assigned to a single server. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Domain Name System. ... An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard. ... HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. ...

Dedicated IP hosting is more expensive than shared IP hosting, since the supply of IP addresses is finite. However, dedicated IP is required for the website to have its own secure HTTP server certificate, anonymous FTP access, and domain name server. Shared IP hosting may also cause problems with very old web browsers, however as of 2005 this has already become a non-issue. In cryptography, a public key certificate (or identity certificate) is a certificate which uses a digital signature to bind together a public key with an identity — information such as the name of a person or an organization, their address, and so forth. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... The Domain Name System or DNS is a system that stores information about host names and domain names in a kind of distributed database on networks, such as the Internet. ... Web browser shortcuts on an Apple computer A web browser is a software application, technically a type of HTTP client, that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Obtaining hosting

Web hosting is often provided as part of a general Internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these services. The free services generally have restrictions on how the space can be used, including but not limited to: advertising, bandwidth restrictions, and programs that can be used to edit sites.

Businesses are generally restricted to using a paid Web host to host their site on. Paid Web hosts usually provide many more features, including 24/7 support and personalized assistance. Sites hosted on paid Web hosts also tend to load more quickly since each server hosts fewer sites, giving each site a larger proportion of resources.

A customer also needs to evaluate the requirements of the application. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Active Server Pages (ASP) web sites usually require a Microsoft Windows based server platform. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP Platform. This includes Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Python, Perl or Ruby). Usually there is limited interoperability between the two, although Linux servers can integrate with Windows file services through Samba, and many Linux hosts provide support for Microsoft FrontPage server extensions. In computing, an operating system ( aka, OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ... It has been suggested that ASPX be merged into this article or section. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Tux is the official Linux mascot. ... Apache HTTP Server is a free software/open source HTTP web server for Unix-like systems (BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, Novell Netware and other platforms. ... David Axmark (left) and Michael Monty Widenius, Founders of MySQL AB, at a conference MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user, SQL (Structured Query Language) Database Management System (DBMS) with an estimated six million installations. ... PHP, short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is an open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. ... Python is an interpreted, interactive programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990, originally as a scripting language for Amoeba OS capable of making system calls. ... Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below) is an interpreted procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall. ... Ruby is a reflective, object-oriented programming language. ... Samba logo. ... Microsoft FrontPage is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web site administration tool from Microsoft for the Windows operating system. ...

Regardless of whether one is a business or has a personal site that needs to be hosted, it has to be created first. HTML experience is usually required to create a site (and more advanced languages can be used for interactive content, such as ASP or those languages used in a LAMP setup), but those without design experience can hire a Web designer to do the heavy lifting. Once the site is online there's not much else that's required: the host generally handles the technical behind-the-scenes work with the server. In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ... Web design is the design or designing of a web page, website or web application. ...

Recently, web hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical aspects. There exist a growing number of Typo3- or Mambo-Hosters. Other popular content management systems include PHP-Nuke and e107. A Web Content Management System is a type of Content management system targeted at managing websites. ... TYPO3 is a free, open source content management system written with PHP and MySQL for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. ... Mambo (formerly named Mambo Open Source or MOS) is an open source content management system (CMS) for creating and managing websites through a simple web interface. ... A Web Content Management System is a type of Content management system targeted at managing websites. ... PHP-Nuke is a web based automated news publishing and content management system (a nuke) based on PHP and MySQL. The system is fully controlled using a web-based user interface. ... e107 refers to: Yellow 2G, a colourant in food denoted by E Number E107 e107, an Open Source CMS This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

See also

• Dedicated hosting
• Dedicated server

Dedicated hosting, also called dedicated server hosting, is a type of hosting that allows an organization to lease an entire server not shared with anyone. ... The term dedicated server refers to an advanced form of web hosting in which the customer rents, and has complete control over, an entire server. ...

External links

• Web hosting (Wikiclassifieds), list of providers
• Open Directory List of Free Web Hosts
• Open Directory List of (all) Web Hosts