1 On 1 Website Hosting
1 On 1 Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available 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 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
Until 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both big 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 aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, generally supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally 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 in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site requires 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 customers to write 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Usually, 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 sometimes sell shared website hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 vary a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for different reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help 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 go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively 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 might be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they might consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole server located in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known method to get a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied by web 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 may also supply an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is generally 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime stats. Quite a few 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer must 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. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client 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 website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major point when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.