Cogeco Website Hosting
Cogeco Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by users, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web 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
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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been established 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 availability, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the money or expertise to achieve this, web site hosting services began to supply services to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop a site 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 increased, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations 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 site 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 free of charge to subscribers. Individuals and companies may also acquire website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal website 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 companies that are not internet service providers 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 internet-based orders.
A complicated site calls for 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 options allow customers 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, 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 kind of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes sell shared web hosting and website companies sometimes have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to be website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 quite a bit 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 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 allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be done for a number of reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server administration jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer sometimes 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 client has full administrative access to the server, which means the customer is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The customer gets their own website server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control 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 allowing the user to modify the server or perhaps create configuration problems. The client typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their customer's computer, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a lot of colocation providers would allow any server configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a relatively new type of hosting platform that allows clients powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than alternatives as other computers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware fails. 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 permits providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client expects they may use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide customers less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Typically web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few benefits to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, an individual server located in a private home can be used to host one or more web sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by obtaining 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 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 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 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. This scheduled downtime is often 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 at times will offer a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers publicly display uptime statistics. Quite a few 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 often offered as part of a larger internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A client should 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. Most hosting providers offer Linux-based website hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A user might also choose 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. Web hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites which belong to their clients, internet security is a very important worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service supplies is extremely important to a possible customer and can be a major component when deciding which supplier a client may choose.
Web hosting server 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 information, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.