Costco Business Website Hosting
Costco Business Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and companies to make their site accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are companies that supply 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 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 small number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been created and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was increased internet access, 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 budget or expertise to do this, web site hosting services began to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build 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 internet increased, the pressure for organizations, both large and small, 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 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 very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. Individuals and organizations may also get website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by various 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 generally has a greater expense depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large organizations that are not internet service providers need to be permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to provide details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website demands a more expanded 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 sites that wish to keep the data transmitted safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Generally, 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 fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers sometimes make available shared website hosting and website organizations generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits clients to be website hosts themselves. Resellers may function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are working with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may differentiate a lot in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Many resellers offer a nearly identical 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 separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be handed out in a way that does not directly reflect the shared hardware. VPS will sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for different reasons, which includes the possibility to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are generally responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin jobs for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The user gets their own website server and has complete 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 generally 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 client gets his or her own website 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 manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not given complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the user to modify the server or possibly create configuration problems. The customer generally 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 supplies physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and expensive type of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the customer would have their own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any system configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting organizations now require rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that allows customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site may be more reliable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, local power failures or even natural disasters are less of a problem for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users just for resources consumed by the customer, rather than a flat fee for the amount the client thinks they might consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may give users less control over where their data is located, which could be a problem for clients with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having multiple servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are multiple options to the mass managing of clients).
Grid Hosting
This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a number of websites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively work to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A quick opportunity to get a reliable DNS hostname is by having 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 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 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 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 available 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) might include a reasonable amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the servers. 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 computer drops lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is not to be taken lightly. Not all providers provide uptime statistics. 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 each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes offered as part of a larger internet access plan from internet service providers. There are also many free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer should 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 offer Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of various software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting customer may want to acquire other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might 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. Website hosting packages generally include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites which belong to their customers, internet security is an important issue. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are relinquishing control of the security of their website to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major point when deciding which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be attacked by malicious people in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.