Author Website Hosting
Author Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to do this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, 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 interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, 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 generally has a greater expense 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 organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site calls for a more inclusive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow customers to develop 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located 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 that are available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 lot 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 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for varying reasons, which includes the option 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 patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user usually does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 user gets their own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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 number of colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the customer expects 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 worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known method to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 types of hosting offered 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 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 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 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is often 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website 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. Most hosting providers supply Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different 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 acquire other services, such as email for their organization 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 customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is an extreme worry. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a possible customer and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.