1And1 Website Hosting
1And1 Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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
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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to manage this, web site hosting services started to supply services 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 website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. 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 site interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web 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 website orders.
A complex website needs a more expanded package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow clients to develop 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a great deal 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 supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for a few reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might 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 supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their customer's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any computer 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 relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer expects they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide users less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual machine situated in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting offered by website 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 provide 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 does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 website 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime stats. Most 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Many hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which provides 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 customer may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet 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 website. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible customer and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a client should choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.