Charter Website Hosting
Charter Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations 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 customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
Until 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site 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, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to get the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to create a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. People and companies may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, 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 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 constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website demands a more inclusive package that offers 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 sites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, 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 available with this kind of service can be relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times provide shared website hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers may 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 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 supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be desired for different 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. Users are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 user gets their own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied 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 disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
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 server 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 supply little to no assistance directly for their user'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 visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand 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 website may be more reliable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user guesses they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give clients less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for clients with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of benefits to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single server situated in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully try to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 may also supply 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 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 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) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime statistics. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client should 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 website hosting client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites which belong to their customers, internet security is a very important concern. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective customer and can be a major issue when deciding which supplier a customer should choose.
Web hosting computers can be targeted by malicious organizations in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.