Service that provides individuals, organizations and users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the Web is termed as Web Hosting. Companies that grant access to space on a server , which they own for the use by their clients, as well as providing Internet connectivity, normally in a data center are termed as web hosts. Data center space and connectivity is also provided by web hosts to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center.
Scopes of hosting services
The most basic scope of hosting service is file hosting (or Web page hosting); here web pages and other files can be uploaded via FTP or a Web interface. The files are generally delivered to the Web in its present condition or with little processing. Free service is being offered by many ISP’s to its subscribers. Web page hosting can also be obtained from services such as GeoCities or Yahoo! Web page hosting is in general free. Thus the scopes of hosting services vary widely.
Types of Hosting
Several general types of hosting
� free hosting :-when compared to paid hosting just about all the free web hosting available is extremely limited. Free web hosts generally involve their own ads on the site; they also have very tight disk space and traffic limits and allows only web-based uploading and editing of the site. Still, mostly people start with free web hosting.
� Shared hosting: as several hundred other sites one’s Web site is placed on the same server. All of the sites can come down with another site on the server this is one of the problem of shared hosting. There are some restrictions regarding what exactly can be done with shared hosting, although these restrictions are nowhere near as limiting as for free hosting.
� Image hosting: This type of hosting is often free and most require registrations. Hosting only a few different formats of images is Image Hosting. So that one can upload images on their servers and not waste space/bandwidth most image hosts allow hotlinking
� Clustered hosting: it offers the benefits of a dedicated server, but at affordable shared hosting prices and is designed to eliminate the problems intrinsic with typical shared hosting infrastructures. Customers are provided with a �clustered� handling of security, load balancing, and necessary web site resources with this hosting technology.
� Dedicated hosting: one gets a server of one’s own with dedicated hosting. except for those designed to maintain the integrity of the Web host’s network (for example, due to the increase risk of attack by hackers and grey legal issues for the ISP, banning sites with adult content) they have no restrictions. The user is also normally on his own except in the case when a separate plan is purchased from the host. As the purchase of the dedicated server it is generally far more expensive compared to shared hosting this can be an expensive proposal.
� Virtual Private Server (or Virtual Dedicated Server) hosting: enabling of one physical server to house several Virtual Environments which behave exactly like an isolated stand-alone server is termed as Virtual Private Server technology. Normally offering all the same benefits, such as root access this is often a much more affordable solution than a dedicated server.
� Reseller hosting: those who want to become Web hosts themselves reseller hosting is designed for them. A large amount of space and bandwidth is available for anyone that can be divided up among as many sites as the user wants to put on his account. Just like with shared hosting but there are fewer accounts a reseller account is placed on the same server with other reseller accounts.
� Collocated hosting: when user purchases server himself and installs at the host’s data center it is collocated hosting. The user have to pay extra for many services dedicated hosting provides by default besides unmonitored reboots . In general people with server administration experience and those with more significant needs than which can be satisfied by dedicated or shared hosting choose Collocated hosting. If one is not colocating many servers, this is usually the most expensive and least cost effective option. Shared hosting is the cheapest of all these most fitting and cheapest way for 99% of new webmasters.
