Alibaba Website Hosting
Alibaba Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies 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 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
Until 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 tiny 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 site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to do this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally 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 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 products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site needs a more inclusive package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow customers 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 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 offer 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for a number of reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually 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 client gets their own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user usually doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin 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 is not allowed complete control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage 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 allowing the customer to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their customer's machine, 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect 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 website might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer expects they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control on where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website 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 users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A wonderful way 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 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 website 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This 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 system drops below 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 understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime stats. Most 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a larger 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 kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. A number 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 customer might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer 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 often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is an important topic. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a potential customer and can be a major item when considering which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.