Check Website Hosting History
Check Website Hosting History
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 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 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 written and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the money or capability to do this, website hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to own the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a website that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, 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 web interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. A lot of internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service at no charge to users. People and companies may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their products and services and facilities for online orders.
A complicated site requires 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 customers to write 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 varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. 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 generally provide shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become 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 quite a bit in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out 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 might be wanted for different reasons, which includes the option to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server and has complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user often does not 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 customer gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed complete control over the server (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the customer to change the server or perhaps create configuration issues. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the strongest and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their user's computer, 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 system 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 allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat rate for the amount the customer assumes they will use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be problematic for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for improved 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. (Typically web 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
Sometimes, a single server placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully attempt to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting provided 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 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 web 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 website 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers show uptime info. Quite a number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client must 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 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 website hosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may 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. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical parts.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, online security is an extreme item. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the service provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service provides is very important to a prospective client and can be a major consideration when deciding which provider a customer may 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 different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.