Corporate Website Hosting
Corporate Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, usually in a data center. Web 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
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 website 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 increased internet availability, the situation was complicated until 1995.
To host a website on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to do this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the client needing to acquire the necessary infrastructure required to run the website. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to develop a site that would be hosted on the web hosting service's server and published to the internet by the web hosting service.
As the number of users on the world wide web grew, the pressure for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence increased. 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 website interface. The files are often delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service free of charge to subscribers. People and organizations may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is supplied by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally 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 permanently connected to the web 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 online orders.
A complicated site needs a more comprehensive 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 develop 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 website hosting services differs a lot.
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 available with this type of service can be fairly basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often provide shared website hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become 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 vary a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers supply a similar service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the technical 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be wanted for a few reasons, including the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own web server and has absolute control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user 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 customer has full admin access to the server, which means the customer 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 client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to control their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not granted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not permitting the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration issues. The client usually doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the user owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no assistance directly for their client's server, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colocation, the user would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would accept any system 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 modern type of hosting platform that permits customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others since other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Also, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also permits providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the user thinks they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might provide customers less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy concerns.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a solid solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are a lot of options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole computer placed in a private home can be used to host one or more sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block home servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful opportunity to keep a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 supplied by web 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 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 web server that does not use a control panel for managing the hosting account, is sometimes 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 such as during network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. The 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 system drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider often will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is determined is different from provider to provider, therefore examining the SLA is crucial. Not all providers produce uptime stats. Quite a number of 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is often supplied as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also many 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. A number of hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers 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 customer might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, web security is an extreme topic. When a client agrees to use a web hosting service, they are giving up control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is very important to a possible customer and can be a major point when considering which provider a customer will choose.
Website hosting server can be targeted by malicious users 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 info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.