Amazon Web Services Website Hosting
Amazon Web Services Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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 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 written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to achieve this, web site hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure 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 website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 website interface. The files are often 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 users. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly 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 products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website 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 programs allow clients 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site 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 generally make available shared web hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for varying reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client generally doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative 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 website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The customer usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 hosts now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, 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 goes down. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users only for resources used by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the client guesses they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating 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 many benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or more sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 kinds 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 could also offer 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer is encouraged to 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 number of 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 obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a potential customer and can be a major point when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.