2 Website Hosting
2 Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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
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 put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to do this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a site 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 internet increased, the demand for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple 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. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times 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 expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site requires a more expanded 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 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 safe.
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 website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Usually, 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 relatively simple 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 offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 fair amount 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 provide the technical 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 split up in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often 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 customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures 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 just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user guesses they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide clients less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to have 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 web 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 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 doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 website 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime statistics. 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should 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 supply Linux-based web 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 client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is an extreme concern. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a possible customer and can be a major item when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, including 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.