Blu Website Hosting
Blu Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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
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 small 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 website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was convoluted 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 do this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, 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 world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies 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 website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently 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 demands a more expanded package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow clients 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. Usually, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to take on the role of web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated 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 offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer the technical 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for a few reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client usually 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 client 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 their own website server but is not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The customer typically 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 offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their customer'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 companies now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client expects they will use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a group of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website 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 variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 web 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 might also supply an interface or control panel for managing the web server and installing scripts, as well as other modules and service applications like email. A website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is generally 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 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times supplied as part of a larger 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 provide Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer might want to obtain 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is an extreme worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible customer and can be a major consideration when considering which provider a client will choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.