Best Secure Website Hosting
Best Secure Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer 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 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 limited 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 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 web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to do this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to subscribers. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website needs 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 programs allow customers to develop 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 greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Typically, 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 make available shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 differentiate quite a bit 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 supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for a number of reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their client's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new kind of hosting platform that allows customers 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. Also, 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 used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often 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 type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual server located 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 machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A wonderful method to keep 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 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 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 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is often 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 generally will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers release uptime stats. Quite a few 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 offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client should 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 provide 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 website hosting user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may 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. Website hosting packages often include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is an important issue. 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 website. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is very important to a prospective customer and can be a major consideration when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious organizations 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.