Crystal Website Hosting
Crystal Website Hosting
A website hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows people and companies to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Website hosts are organizations that provide 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
Until 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 website pages. The world wide web protocols had only just been put together and not until the end of 1993 would there be a graphical web browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was some opening up of internet access, 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 expertise to complete this, web hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the customer needing to own the necessary infrastructure neededd to run the web site. The owners of the websites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to construct a website 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 companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, organizations such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing free hosting.
Classification
Smaller Hosting Services
The most basic 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 often delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Many internet service providers (ISPs) provide this service at no charge to users. People and organizations may also get web page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free website hosting service is provided by different companies with limited services, generally supported by advertisements, and often 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 investment depending upon the size and type of the site.
Larger Hosting Services
Many large companies that are not internet service providers need to be permanently 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 supply details of their goods and services and facilities for website orders.
A complex site needs a more inclusive 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 customers to develop 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Web Hosting Service
One's website is located on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of sites. Usually, 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers at times make available shared website hosting and web organizations at times have reseller accounts to offer hosting for customers.
Reseller Website Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits clients to take on the role of web 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 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 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 handed out in a way that doesn't directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be desired for varying reasons, which includes the possibility to relocate a VPS container from one server to another. The users might have root access to their own virtual space. Users are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may provide server administration tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own web server and gains absolute 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 admin access to the server, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated server.
Managed Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the user is not given root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); but, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The user is not permitted full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to change the server or possibly create configuration issues. The user generally does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation Web Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated web hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting company supplies physical space that the computer takes up and manages the server. This is the strongest and costly type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may supply little to no help directly for their user's machine, providing just the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. 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, a lot of colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosting companies now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a modern type of hosting platform that permits customers strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website may be more stable than alternatives 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 problematic for cloud hosted sites, as cloud hosting is not centralized. Cloud hosting also allows providers to invoice users only for resources consumed by the client, instead of a flat fee for the amount the client expects they might use, or a fixed rate upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization might give users less control on where their data is located, which could be a problem for users with data security or privacy issues.
Clustered Hosting
Having a few servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or building a scalable website hosting system. A cluster may separate website serving from database hosting capability. (Generally web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans, as there are quite a few options to the mass managing of users).
Grid Hosting
This type of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Usually, a sole machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a few sites from a typically consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built computers or more commonly older PCs. Some ISPs purposefully work to block home servers by stopping incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A wonderful way to attain 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 directs to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting supplied by website 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 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 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 website is measured by the percentage of a year in which the website 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 during 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 generally excluded from 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 lower than that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider generally will supply a partial refund for lost time. How downtime is calculated changes from provider to provider, therefore reading the SLA is imperative. Not all providers produce uptime information. A number of hosting providers will guarantee at least 99.9% uptime which will provide for 43 minutes of downtime each month, or 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime every year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is at times offered as part of a complete internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot of 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. Many 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 obtain other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multimedia services. A user may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The client still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Website hosting packages sometimes include a web content management system, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical items.
Security
Because website hosting services host sites belonging to their customers, internet security is a vital topic. When a customer agrees to use a web hosting service, they are passing on control of the security of their site to the provider that is hosting the site. The amount of security that a website hosting service provides is very important to a potential customer and can be a major component when deciding which provider a customer may choose.
Website hosting server can be attacked 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, including stealing credit card info, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.