Business Website Hosting
Business 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 companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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
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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations 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 own the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web to 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 needs 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 customers to write 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 web hosting services varies greatly.
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. 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 simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared web hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Website 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 following types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a great deal 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 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for varying reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is generally 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 customer gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web 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 website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance 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 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 system 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 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 may be more stable than alternatives 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 problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources used by the client, rather than a flat fee for the amount the customer assumes they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide users less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual machine located in a private home can be used to host one or a number of websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A quick method to get 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 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 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 web server that does not 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 website 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is often 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime information. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of 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. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 customer might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might 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. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, online security is an important item. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a possible customer and can be a major item when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be attacked by malicious people in different 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.