Amazon Website Hosting
Amazon Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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
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 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 increased internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to achieve this, website hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, 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 higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website calls for a more expanded 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 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located 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 that are available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared web hosting and web companies at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers 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 affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate tremendously 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 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 split up in a way that does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for a few reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server and has 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 sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give users less control over where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole computer located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A quick method to keep 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 points 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 provide 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 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 website 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. A number of 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer must 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. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 website hosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is a very important concern. When a customer 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 supplies is extremely important to a potential customer and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a client will choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. 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.