A Website Hosting Service Charges Businesses
A Website Hosting Service Charges Businesses
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also supply 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 restricted 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 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 more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to do this, web site hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for organizations, both large 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 awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to subscribers. People and companies may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher cost 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 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 products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site requires a more inclusive package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Typically, 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become website 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 quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out 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 done for different reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 client gets their own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client assumes they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole computer located 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 old PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great method to have a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied 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 supply an interface or control panel for managing the web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that does not 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 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 at times 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers produce uptime info. 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website 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 offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, online security is a vital issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a prospective client and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a client will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, including 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.