Bitcoin Website Hosting
Bitcoin 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. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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
Until 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 written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to manage this, website hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for organizations, both big 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 awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater investment 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 in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated website will have 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 develop 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web 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 type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to become 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 differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated 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, however, virtualization may be desired for different reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user 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 often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 customer gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the client 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 customer is disallowed 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 user sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, 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 invoice users only for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user guesses they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide clients less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building 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 a number of benefits to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively try to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common opportunity to get 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 types of hosting offered by website host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not web pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host can 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 at times 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 per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 generally will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Most 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 generally offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer must 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 lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 client might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital item. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a possible client and can be a major topic when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Web 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 various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.