Amazon Website Hosting Services
Amazon Website Hosting Services
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website 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. 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
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 tiny 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 site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to manage this, web hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to subscribers. People and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site needs 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 clients to create 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 varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 available with this kind of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 fair amount in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is 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 shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for varying reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any server 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 modern type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources used by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client assumes they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for improved 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. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single server located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a generally 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 well-known way to attain 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 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 website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website 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 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This 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 lower than 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 imperative. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client must 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 offer Linux-based website hosting which provides a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose 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. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a very important issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is super important to a potential customer and can be a major point when considering which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.