Amazon Static Website Hosting Cost
Amazon Static Website Hosting Cost
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies 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 clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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 browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to manage this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various 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 web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater 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 permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website will have a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities 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 quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located 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 available with this kind of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared website hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 offer 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 doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be chosen for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients 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 gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally 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 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 not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website 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 server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than others since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client expects they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs 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 can 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 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 available and reachable via the internet. This is different 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 systems. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime stats. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website 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 offers 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 might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user 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 sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a potential customer and can be a major item when considering which supplier a client will choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.