Car Dealership Website Hosting
Car Dealership Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that supply 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 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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to do this, website hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to create 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 increased, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and sometimes 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 sometimes has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not internet service providers need to be constantly connected to the web in order 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 online orders.
A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow clients to develop 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 varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, 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 available with this kind of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared web hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to be website 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 great deal 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be chosen for a few reasons, including the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, 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 admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to change the server or potentially create configuration issues. The user sometimes doesn't 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 customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their customer's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any server 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 users powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware stops working. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users just for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer thinks they might use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a number of 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
Typically, an individual computer placed in a private residence can be used to host one or multiple web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A great method to keep 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 offered 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 could also provide an interface or control panel for managing the website 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website is publicly available 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This scheduled downtime is at times 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 computer drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime statistics. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client is encouraged 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. Many hosting providers supply 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 client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client 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 web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical components.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, online security is a very important concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a web hosting service offers is quite important to a possible client and can be a major topic when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.