Att Website Hosting
Att Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide 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 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
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 tiny number of web 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 some opening up of internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to do this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to subscribers. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, often 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 higher expense 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 so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site demands 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical 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 separates 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, but, virtualization might be desired for varying reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users 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 user gets his or her own website server and has absolute 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 usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 client gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, 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 companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the user, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a single server located in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common method 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 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 could 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 web server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly accessible 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs to 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based web 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 customer may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is an important worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is quite important to a potential customer and can be a major issue when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in various 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.