Check Website Hosting Company
Check Website Hosting Company
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that offer 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 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 tiny number of website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been written and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or company would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to do this, web site hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to install the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a site 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 world wide web grew, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. 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 interface. The files are typically delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by various companies with limited services, generally supported by adds, and generally 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 often has a greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site demands 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and web organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a fair amount 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 provide the technical 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 split up in a way that doesn't directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be chosen for a few reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and gains absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, the client usually does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the customer to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The user often does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies 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 client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to 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 site may be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user expects they may consume, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their information is located, which could be problematic for clients 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 having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, a sole machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A great method to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types 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 can 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 web server that does not 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 during 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. The scheduled downtime is sometimes 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is crucial. Not all providers produce uptime information. Quite a few 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 sometimes supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer should 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. Most hosting providers provide 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 client might want to obtain 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their clients, web security is an important issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the company that is hosting the site. The level of security that a web hosting service supplies is super important to a potential client and can be a major subject when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.