AWS Ec2 Website Hosting
AWS Ec2 Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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
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 small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to achieve this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called 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 world wide web grew, the demand for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 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 companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various organizations with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and at times 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 at times has a higher 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 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 complicated site demands a more expanded package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow customers 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features that are available with this type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared website hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed 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 supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer 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 does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for different reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client generally doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically 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 his or her own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the customer to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client 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 website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their 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 hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user expects they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros 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
Sometimes, a sole machine located in a private home can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known method to keep 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered by website 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 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 does not 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is at times supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client 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 web hosting which offers 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 customer may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might 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 web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a vital worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a potential customer and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.