AWS S3 Static Website Hosting Redirection Rules
AWS S3 Static Website Hosting Redirection Rules
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies 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 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 restricted 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 till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to complete this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to build a site 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 organizations, 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 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 generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and generally 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 sometimes has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site will have a more expanded package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow clients to create 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 type of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often make available shared website hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 a fair amount 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 offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out 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, however, virtualization may be desired for different reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client usually does not 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 client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over 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 not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the client thinks they may use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect 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 multiple options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a few sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively work 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 quick opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 types of hosting provided 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 can 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 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 site 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 when there is 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 sometimes 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime statistics. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. 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 number of hosting providers offer 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 web hosting client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, online security is a very important issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a possible client and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a customer should choose.
Web 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 different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.