Apple Website Hosting
Apple Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations 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 clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website hosts can also provide 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 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to do this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to design a site 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 world wide web grew, the pressure for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations 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 site interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web so they can 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 complex website will have 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 clients to create 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 varies greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. 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 at times make available shared website hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a lot 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 provide the technical 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 doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be done for different reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin 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 they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the user to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any computer 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 modern kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client guesses they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
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 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 benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole server situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick method to get 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied by web 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 might 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 website server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is generally 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 as in the event of 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. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime statistics. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally supplied as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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. a lot of hosting providers offer 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 user might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, web security is an important worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible customer and can be a major point when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.