Adobe Portfolio Website Hosting
Adobe Portfolio Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web 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 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 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 greater internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to manage this, website hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create 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 large and small, to have an online presence grew. 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 web interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and generally 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 large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization 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 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 develop 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 Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. 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 sometimes make available shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 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 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 handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically 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 client 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 user gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their 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 computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer expects they may use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website 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 clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A good way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 types of hosting supplied 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 could 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 web 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 accessible 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. Many hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many 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. a lot of 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 web hosting client may want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, internet security is a vital issue. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious organizations in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.