Cloudfront Website Hosting
Cloudfront Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a kind of internet hosting service that allows people and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply 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 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
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 tiny number of website 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 more internet access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, a person or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to do this, web hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to configure the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a website 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 organizations, both big and small, 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 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 minimal processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply 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 provided by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web 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 large organizations that are not ISPs need to be constantly 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 online orders.
A complex website needs 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website 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. Generally, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers generally provide shared website hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers can function, for individual domains, under any combination of these following types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary quite a bit 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 divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration jobs for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own web server and gains complete control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally doesn't 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 client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server but is not allowed full control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not allowed complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The client often does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their user's machine, 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, many colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than alternatives since other servers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, local power outages or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the user, instead of a flat rate for the amount the client guesses they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be problematic for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole server located in a private home can be used to host one or a few sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully work to block residential servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A good 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 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 might 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 website 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 site is publicly accessible 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 as in the event of a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. This scheduled downtime is often 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 at times will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers produce uptime stats. 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 every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a general internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web 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 website 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 user might want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer may also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Since website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, online security is an extreme concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a potential customer and can be a major component when deciding which provider a client will choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious organizations in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, such as stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.