Bigpond Website Hosting
Bigpond Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was confused 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 money or expertise to do this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, 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 sometimes has a higher cost 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 company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website demands a more expanded 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a nearly identical 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 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, however, virtualization may be done for a few reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client typically does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 user gets his or her own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The customer typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources used by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client expects they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs actively try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common opportunity to keep 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 points 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 can also offer 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 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 available 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers show uptime stats. A lot of 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client is encouraged to 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 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 web hosting customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also prefer 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 at times include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is an important issue. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service supplies is very important to a possible client and can be a major point when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various 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 data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.