AWS Free Website Hosting
AWS Free Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind 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 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
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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established and not until 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, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or experience to complete this, web site hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for organizations, 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 awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to subscribers. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher cost 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 in order to 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 complex site will have a more comprehensive 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 develop 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 vary a great deal 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 supply 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 computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for varying reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container between servers. The users may 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 administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user generally 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 web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website 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 costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their client's server, providing only 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 lot of colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 website may be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power disruptions 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 used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer thinks they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for stable 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 website 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 variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A well-known method to attain 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 provided 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 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 web server that doesn't 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 website 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) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers produce uptime statistics. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A usual 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 business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might 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. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is an important issue. 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 level of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major subject when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations 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 information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.