Bulletproof Website Hosting
Bulletproof Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer 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 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
Up till 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 written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to complete this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the demand for organizations, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. 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 website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, often 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 often has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies 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 offer details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex site demands a more comprehensive package that supplies database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These options allow clients to create 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 a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to take on the role of 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 vary a great deal 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 split up in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for a number of reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets his or her own website server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually 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 client gets his or her own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Also, 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 allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client guesses they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single machine placed in a private home 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 old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A common opportunity 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 could 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 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 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 systems. This 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers provide uptime stats. 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website 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. A number of 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 web hosting client might want to have other services, such as email for their organization 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 customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, web security is an extreme topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a potential client and can be a major item when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in different ways, which include 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.