Azure Website Hosting Pricing
Azure Website Hosting Pricing
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Website 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 web 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 more internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to do this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build 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 increased, the pressure for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. 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 web interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations 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 organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website will have a more inclusive 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 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, 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 available with this type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared website hosting and web companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a lot 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 provide 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for a few reasons, including the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to change the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their customer's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client thinks they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give customers less control over where their information is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a single server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common method to get 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 types 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 may also supply 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 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 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) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally 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 must 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 provide Linux-based web 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 customer might want to acquire 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 client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a very important topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is quite important to a potential client and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.