Create Your Own Website Hosting Server
Create Your Own Website Hosting Server
A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that permits individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are organizations that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by customers, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically 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
Until 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 web pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web site browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, the situation was convoluted until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or business would need their own computer or server. As not all companies had the budget or capability to achieve this, web hosting services started to supply services to host users' websites on their own servers, without the customer needing to purchase the necessary infrastructure required to operate the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to build a website that would be hosted on the website hosting service's server and published to the internet by the website hosting service.
As the number of users on the internet increased, the demand for companies, both big and small, to have an online presence increased. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were offering free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most simple is awebsite page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a website interface. The files are sometimes delivered to the web "as is" or with very little processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) supply this service with no cost to users. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different organizations with limited services, generally supported by adds, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient for personal website pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting sometimes 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 constantly connected to the web in order to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The organization may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their products and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website requires a more inclusive 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 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 safe.
Types of Hosting
Internet hosting services can manage web servers. The scope of website hosting services differs greatly.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, 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 quite simple and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared web hosting and website organizations sometimes have reseller accounts to supply hosting for clients.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller web hosting permits 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 affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously 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 offer the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated 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 done for a few reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. Users may have root access to their own virtual space. Users are sometimes responsible for fixing and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may offer server admin tasks for the customer (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gets full control over it (user has root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the customer generally does not 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 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 complete control over it (the user is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they can manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The customer is not permitted 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 often doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Similar to the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company offers physical space that the server takes up and manages the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their customer's server, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have their 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 expect rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that permits users strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted site might be more stable than others since other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware stops working. Furthermore, local power failures or even natural disasters are less problematic for cloud hosted websites, as cloud hosting is decentralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources used by the client, rather than a flat amount for the amount the client expects they will consume, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give users less control over where their information is located, which could be an issue for customers with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a bunch of servers host the same content for stable resource utilization. Clustered computers are a good solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Sometimes website hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few pros to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Often, a sole server placed in a private home can be used to host one or a few web sites from a generally consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built servers or more commonly older PCs. Some internet service providers purposefully attempt to block residential servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the client's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A quick opportunity to keep 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 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 could 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 website server that doesn't 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 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 certain amount of scheduled downtime each year in order to perform maintenance on the computers. The 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 at times will provide a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated varies from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers produce uptime stats. A lot of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime every month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Web hosting is sometimes provided as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of free and paid providers offering web hosting.
A customer 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 number of hosting providers supply Linux-based website 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 user might want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A customer might also prefer Windows as the hosting platform. The user still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the client may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages sometimes include a website content management system, so the end-user doesn't have to be concerned about the more technical aspects.
Security
Because web hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, internet security is a very important worry. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The degree of security that a website hosting service provides is super important to a potential customer and can be a major consideration when considering which supplier a client will choose.
Web hosting computers can be attacked by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted website. 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.