AWS Static Website Hosting Cost
AWS Static Website Hosting Cost
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website hosts can also offer 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 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 tiny 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 web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a site 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 internet grew, the pressure for organizations, both big 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 simple 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web 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 ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site calls for a more comprehensive package that supplies 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 write 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, 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 type of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech 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 does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for a number of 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. Customers are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user generally does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 client gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user'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 allow any server 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 relatively modern 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 others as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, 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 client expects 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 problematic for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole server placed in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A easy opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied 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 can also supply an interface or control panel for managing the website server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A web 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 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime statistics. Quite 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 offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer is encouraged to 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 website hosting which provides 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 may want to have other services, such as email for their business 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 client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web 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 which belong to their clients, web security is a very important worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations in various 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.