1 Page Website Hosting
1 Page Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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
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 until 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 challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to manage this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies 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 site interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated website needs 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 clients to create 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a great deal 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 supply the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is 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 server's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be wanted for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user sometimes doesn't 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 provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power outages 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 only for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat fee for the amount the user guesses they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website 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 variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a single server placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick way to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 kinds of hosting provided 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 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 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 site is publicly available 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is often not included in 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. Quite a few 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often provided as part of a larger 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. a lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based website 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 website hosting user may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also prefer 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 at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, online security is an extreme concern. When a client 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 supplies is super important to a prospective client and can be a major point when deciding which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.