Costco Website Hosting
Costco Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their site available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide 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 supply 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 website 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 access, the situation was confused until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, an individual or organization would need their own computer or server. As not all organizations had the money or experience to achieve this, web site hosting services started to offer to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to put together the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the website. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to design a website 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 internet grew, the pressure for companies, both large and tiny, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were supplying free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic is aweb page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web site interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service free to users. Individuals and companies may also acquire web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is offered by various companies with limited services, at times supported by adds, and sometimes limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is often sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not ISPs need to be constantly connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex website requires a more expanded package that offers database support and application development platforms (e.g. ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java EE, Perl/Plack, PHP or Ruby on Rails). These programs allow clients 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 more secure.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of web hosting services differs a lot.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other websites, 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 that are available with this type of service can be fairly simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting allows customers to take on the role of website 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 provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and supply the tech 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 sometimes be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization might be chosen for varying reasons, including the option to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are typically responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The customer gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the client often does not own the server. One kind of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is often the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full admin access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets his or her own web server but they are not allowed full control over it (the customer 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 user is disallowed 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 issues. The client usually does not own the server. The server is leased to the user.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and manages the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no help directly for their customer's server, 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 accept any computer 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 relatively new kind of hosting platform that allows users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives as other servers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware goes down. Also, 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 just for resources consumed by the user, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user thinks they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the decentralization may provide users less control on where their information is located, which could be a deal breaker for clients with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having several servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are many options to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a single machine situated in a private home can be used to host one or multiple websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers actively attempt to block home servers by not allowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to have 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 could 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 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 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 specific amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The scheduled downtime is generally 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 below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will provide a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is crucial. Not all providers release uptime info. Quite a few hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime per month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime each year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is generally supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number 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 offer Linux-based web hosting which provides a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The website hosting user might want to have 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 user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages often include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Security
Since web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, web security is a very important worry. When a customer agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their website to the organization that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service offers is super important to a potential customer and can be a major issue when considering which supplier a client may choose.
Website hosting computers can be targeted by malicious users in different ways, which include uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, such as stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.