Canberraweb Website Hosting Canberra
Canberraweb Website Hosting Canberra
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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
Up till 1991, the internet was limited 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 established and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was additional internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to achieve this, website hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as 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 world wide web increased, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web 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 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 provide details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex website demands 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 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 Website Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of sites. 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally sell shared website hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to take on the role of website 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 similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech 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 underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be desired for a few reasons, which includes the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs 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); but, the customer typically 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 user has full admin 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 website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client 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 tools. The customer is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The client sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's server, 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 lot of colocation providers would allow 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 relatively modern kind of hosting platform that permits clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources used by the customer, rather than a flat rate for the amount the user thinks they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their information is located, which could be challenging for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. 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 benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a few web sites from a generally 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 stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy method to have 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied by web 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 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 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 website 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This scheduled downtime is generally 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 at times will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. Quite a number 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
Web hosting is at times offered as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs 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 supply Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 website hosting user may want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client 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 often include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the company that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is quite important to a prospective customer and can be a major item when deciding which provider a client will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.