Church Website Hosting
Church Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that supply 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 supply 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 small number of website 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 site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was more internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to manage this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to assemble the necessary infrastructure neededd 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 website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the demand for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The simplest 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 typically delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service at no charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, often supported by advertisements, and at times 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 greater cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not ISPs 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 offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex site will have a more expanded package that offers 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 write 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites to hundreds of websites. 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 relatively basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes provide shared website hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to be 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 vary tremendously 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 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 allocated in a way that doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own website server and has full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 client gets their own web server but is not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no support directly for their user's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow 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 type 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 stable than others since other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources used by the user, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client assumes they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give users less control over where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a great solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website 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 variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Sometimes, an individual server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully try to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A good method to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 types 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 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 often 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) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined changes from provider to provider, therefore understanding the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client needs to 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which provides 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 user might want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user 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 web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites which belong to their clients, internet security is an important concern. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a potential client and can be a major issue when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.