Cargo Website Hosting
Cargo Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website hosts can also provide 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or expertise to achieve this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as 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 world wide web increased, the demand for organizations, both big and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 website interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service with no cost to subscribers. People and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting generally has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website needs a more inclusive 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and website companies often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows clients to become website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a lot 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 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 underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for different reasons, which includes the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. The users may 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 offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer usually doesn't own the server. One type 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 user 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 is not allowed full 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 user is not permitted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to change the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The customer sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, 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 modern type of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. 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 just for resources used by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client guesses they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be challenging for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, an individual computer located in a private home can be used to host one or more sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful way to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating 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 offered 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 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime info. Most 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often supplied 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 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 user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client 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 concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, web security is a very important issue. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service provides is super important to a possible client and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a client will choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.