Bulk Website Hosting
Bulk Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply 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 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to complete this, web hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to 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 web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, 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 awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to subscribers. People and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website calls for 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 sites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared web hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 tremendously 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 offer 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for different reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are usually responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client usually doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is not given 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 granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user generally does not 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 organization offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now demand 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 others since other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat rate for the amount the client assumes they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide users less control over where their data is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual computer located in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common method to keep 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 provided 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 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 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime info. Most 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. 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 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 provides 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 web hosting client may want to acquire 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. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is a vital issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major item when deciding which supplier a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users 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 information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.