Best Photography Business Website Hosting
Best Photography Business Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. 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 web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 site interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times 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 generally has a higher 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 offer details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site needs a more inclusive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These facilities allow clients 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites 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 kind of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared website hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of 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 vary 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 technical 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 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 may be wanted for different reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often 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 customer gets their own website server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes 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 customer gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply 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 client would have his 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 hosts now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type 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 since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to bill users just for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer guesses they may consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a single machine placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 offered 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 could 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 website 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 servers. This scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime information. Quite a few 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer needs 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. A number of hosting providers offer Linux-based website 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 website hosting user 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 customer 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 web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, internet security is an important item. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a potential client and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious organizations in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.