AWS S3 Static Website Hosting
AWS S3 Static Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 small number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written 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 access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to achieve this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. People and organizations may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times 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 companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods 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 options 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Usually, 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 often sell shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be desired for varying reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes 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 user gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client thinks they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually 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 form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole computer situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively try to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to have a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 kinds of hosting provided by web 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 could also provide 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly accessible 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 computers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime stats. Quite a few 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should 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 supply Linux-based website hosting which offers 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 client might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is a very important topic. When a client 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 website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a potential customer and can be a major issue when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Website 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 different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.