Create A Pro Website Hosting
Create A Pro Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and companies to make their website available via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that offer space on a server owned or leased for use by users, 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 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 tiny number of web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together 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, a person or business would need their own computer system or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to manage this, web site hosting services began to provide services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to build the necessary infrastructure neededd to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also known as webmasters, would be able to develop a site that would be hosted on the web 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 tiny, 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 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service with no cost to users. Individuals and companies may also get website page hosting from other service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by various organizations with limited services, sometimes supported by adds, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is sometimes sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting at times has a higher cost depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many big companies that are not internet service providers 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 provide details of their products and services and facilities for website orders.
A complicated website requires 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 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 greatly.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's site is located on the same server as many other websites, ranging from a few websites 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 type of service can be quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared web hosting and website organizations often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting allows customers to take on the role of website hosts themselves. Resellers could 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 tremendously 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
This is also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it separates server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will generally be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, but, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server administration tasks 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); but, the user often doesn't own the server. One type of dedicated hosting is self-managed or unmanaged. This is typically the least expensive for dedicated plans. The client has full administrative access to the server, which means the user is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The user gets his or her own website server but they are not allowed complete control over it (the client is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The client is not allowed full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not granting the client to modify the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user sometimes 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 customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the computer. This is the most powerful and costly kind of website hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no assistance directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the server. 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 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 modern type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than others as other servers in the cloud can take over when a single piece of hardware goes down. Furthermore, local power disruptions or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the client, rather than a flat fee for the amount the user thinks they may consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give customers less control on where their data is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy worries.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or having a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Often website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of customers).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Generally, a sole machine placed in a private residence 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 ISPs purposefully work to block residential servers by blocking incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the customer's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A well-known opportunity to keep 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting offered 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 can also offer 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 site is measured by the percentage of a year in which the site is publicly accessible 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) may include a specific amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 server drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider sometimes will offer a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is determined varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers publicly display uptime stats. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will allow for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times provided as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a number of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer needs 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 different software. A usual configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client may 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 customer 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 does not have to be concerned about the more technical items.
Security
Because web hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, online security is a vital concern. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the organization that is hosting the website. The amount of security that a web hosting service supplies is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major item when deciding which provider a customer should choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked by malicious users in different ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.