Buy Website Hosting Server
Buy Website Hosting Server
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site accessible 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, typically 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
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 until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or experience to complete this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to build 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 internet grew, the demand for companies, both large 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 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher investment 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 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 complex site will have a more expanded package that supplies 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 create 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 safe.
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 website is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared web hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to be web hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these 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 provide a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and offer 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 does not directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for different reasons, including the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes 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 their own website server and gains full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client 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 user gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no help directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the customer assumes they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may provide users less control on where their data is located, which could be problematic for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers 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 multiple pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual machine situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A well-known way to have a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 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 website server that doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 accessible 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally 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 should 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 lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based website 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 user may 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 user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, online security is an extreme concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is very important to a possible customer and can be a major component when deciding which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.