Christian Website Hosting And Design
Christian Website Hosting And Design
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that supply space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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 put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to manage this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also called webmasters, would be able to develop a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite 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 almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to subscribers. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal web 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 companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently 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 offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated site will have 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 options allow customers 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 quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is placed 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 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 website organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits customers to be web 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 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 provide the tech support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
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 underlying hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for a few reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are typically responsible for patching 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 their own web server and gets complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer usually does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (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 software. The customer is disallowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the strongest and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer 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 accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new kind of hosting platform that permits clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. 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 invoice users only for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client guesses they will consume, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control on where their information is located, which could be a problem for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers host the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered computers are a wonderful solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Typically website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known way to have 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 points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting supplied 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 might also offer 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 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 website 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. The scheduled downtime is at times 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is imperative. Not all providers show uptime info. A lot 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is often offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer must 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 number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 web hosting customer may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user 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, internet security is a very important topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the site. The level of security that a website hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major item when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. 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.