Consumer Reports Website Hosting
Consumer Reports Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits people and organizations to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, 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
Up till 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 created 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 web site on the internet, an individual or business would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the budget or capability to complete this, web hosting services started to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to operate the website. The owners of the websites, also known as webmasters, would be able to construct a site that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the web by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering 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 site interface. The files are generally delivered to the web "as is" or with minimal processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free of charge to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various organizations with limited services, at times supported by advertisements, 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 at times has a higher investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not ISPs need to be permanently connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to supply details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site requires a more comprehensive package that supplies 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 create 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 manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies a lot.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Generally, 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 fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times sell shared web hosting and web organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers 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 a fair amount 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 supply the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization might be done for a few reasons, including the ability to relocate a VPS container between servers. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web 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 sometimes the least expensive for dedicated plans. The customer 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 user gets their own web server but they are not allowed full control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can control their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the client to change the server or potentially create configuration problems. The customer sometimes does not own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the client owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's computer, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator visit the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, a number of colocation providers would accept any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now insist on rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a 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 site 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 failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to bill users only for resources consumed by the customer, instead of a flat amount for the amount the client assumes they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization might provide clients less control over where their data is located, which could be an issue for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a number of servers host the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered computers are a fantastic solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Often web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a single server situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a number of sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block residential servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A great opportunity to have 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 provided 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 can also offer an interface or control panel for managing the web 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 at times 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 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 during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. This 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 server drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is important. Not all providers release uptime information. Many 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 often supplied as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering website hosting.
A client is encouraged to 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 lot of hosting providers supply 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 website hosting client might want to obtain other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the customer may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages at times include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host websites belonging to their customers, online security is an extreme item. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is extremely important to a potential client and can be a major subject when deciding which provider a client should choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for different reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.