Buy Website Hosting Space
Buy Website Hosting Space
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their site 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
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 established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to achieve this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also called 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 web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also get web page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, often supported by adds, and at times limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes 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 organizations that are not internet service providers need to be constantly 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 website orders.
A complicated site requires 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 facilities allow clients 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 run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site 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 that are available with this kind of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally make available shared web hosting and website companies generally have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to be website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 vary 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 offer the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often 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 web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user often doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often 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 customer gets their own website server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the customer is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client 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 allow any system 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 kind of hosting platform that permits users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more reliable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the user expects they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a amazing solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole machine located in a private home can be used to host one or multiple sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers 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 easy method 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 supplied 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 may 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 does not 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 site 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime statistics. 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is generally provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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 supply Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client 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. Web hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important issue. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is quite important to a potential customer and can be a major point when deciding which provider a customer should choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.