Best Ecommerce Website Hosting UK
Best Ecommerce Website Hosting UK
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals 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 customers, 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 put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or experience to do this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large 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 online orders.
A complex website needs 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Typically, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to supply 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 following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated 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 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 doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for a number of reasons, including the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client often does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full admin access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer 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 help directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their 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 hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. 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 permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control over where their data is located, which could be problematic for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole machine located in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try 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 easy method 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 supplied 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 may 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 doesn't 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 site 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 such as during 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 servers. The 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime stats. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer 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. Website hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is an important item. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a possible customer and can be a major consideration when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious organizations 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.