Centurylink Website Hosting
Centurylink Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Website 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 put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to do this, website hosting services started to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand for organizations, both large and small, 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 website interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free to users. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various 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 generally has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big organizations that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web in order to 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 internet-based orders.
A complicated website will have a more inclusive 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 manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites 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 quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared web hosting and web organizations often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed 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 offer a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the server's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be done for different reasons, which includes the option to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the user generally doesn't own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over the server (the user is denied 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 granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of 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 user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would accept any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern kind of hosting platform that permits customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware fails. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users just for resources used by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, an individual computer situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively work to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great way to attain 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 kinds of hosting supplied by website 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 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 doesn't use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is at times 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 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 generally will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers show uptime info. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many 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 lot of hosting providers provide Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer might want to obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may 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 at times include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, web security is a vital concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service provides is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major consideration when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.