Cloud Website Hosting
Cloud Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, 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
Until 1991, the internet was restricted 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 established and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the budget 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 build the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying 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 web site interface. The files are usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to users. Individuals and organizations may also obtain web page hosting from other service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, often supported by adds, 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 generally has a greater investment 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 in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their goods and services and facilities for online orders.
A complex 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 options allow clients to create 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few websites 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 relatively simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared website hosting and website companies at times have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers can 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 tremendously 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 offer the tech 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 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 different reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are usually responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client typically does not own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the client 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 full control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer sometimes doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no assistance directly for their user's server, 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 number of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively modern type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources used by the client, instead of a flat amount for the amount the user thinks they will use, or a fixed cost upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give customers less control on where their data 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 creating a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually 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 type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole machine located in a private home can be used to host one or a number of sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively try to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to supply static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically update the IP address that a URL directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific kinds of hosting offered by website host service providers:
- File hosting service: hosts files, not website pages
- Image hosting service
- Video hosting service
- Blog hosting service
- Paste bin
- Shopping cart software
- Email hosting service
Host Management
The host may 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 does not 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 accessible 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 reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers release uptime info. Most 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
Website hosting is sometimes offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A customer 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. Most hosting providers supply 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 web hosting client may want to acquire other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages at times include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical parts.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is an extreme concern. When a client 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 degree of security that a web hosting service supplies is very important to a possible client and can be a major component when considering which supplier a client should choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted 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, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.