Azure Static Website Hosting
Azure Static Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies 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, 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 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 written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to do this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to install the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create 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 grew, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also get 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 web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers 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 provide details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complicated site calls for a more expanded 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 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 web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 tremendously 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for varying reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically 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 gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer usually doesn't own the server. One kind 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 customer gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not permitted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to modify the server or perhaps 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 web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their customer's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they may consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to attain 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 offered 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 might 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 website server that doesn't 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is often 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally 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 customer 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. Many 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 customer might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose 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. Web hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is an extreme topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major point when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.