Basic Website Hosting
Basic Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies 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 users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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
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 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 complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or expertise to achieve this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build 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 companies, 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 basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. People and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and at times 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 at times has a higher 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 constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site demands a more comprehensive package that provides 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 create 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 quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed 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 type of service can be quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 differentiate a great deal 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 provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated 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 might be desired for a number of reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the customer typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not permitted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client generally doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, a lot 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 kind of hosting platform that allows clients strong, 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 compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user expects they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple 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 made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a single computer located in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A common way 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 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 might 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 does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 site 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This scheduled downtime is generally excluded from 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 offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers provide uptime info. Most 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a number 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. a lot of hosting providers provide 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 user might want to have other services, such as email for their business 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 client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical components.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is a vital topic. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a potential client and can be a major consideration when deciding which provider a client should choose.
Website 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 various reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.