Deep Web Website Hosting
Deep Web Website Hosting
A web hosting service is a kind 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 provide 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 put together and not till the end of 1993 would there be a graphical website browser for Mac or Windows computers. Even after there was greater internet availability, the situation was challenging until 1995.
To host a web site on the internet, a person or company would need their own computer system or server. As not all organizations had the money or expertise to complete this, website hosting services began to offer to host users' sites on their own servers, without the client needing to configure the necessary infrastructure required to run the web site. The owners of the sites, also referred to as webmasters, would be able to design a site 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 increased, the demand for companies, both big and tiny, to have an online presence grew. By 1995, companies such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod were providing 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 usually delivered to the web "as is" or with almost no processing. Quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to users. People and organizations may also obtain website page hosting from alternative service providers.
Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and generally limited when compared to paid hosting.
Single page hosting is at times sufficient for personal web pages. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a greater 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 constantly connected to the web to send email, files, etc. to other sites. The company may use the computer as a website host to offer details of their goods and services and facilities for internet-based orders.
A complex website demands a more comprehensive 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 clients 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 run web servers. The scope of web hosting services varies quite a bit.
Shared Website Hosting Service
One's website is found on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few sites to hundreds of websites. Typically, 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 basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates. Resellers often sell shared website hosting and web companies generally have reseller accounts to supply hosting for customers.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller website hosting permits customers to become website hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary a lot 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
Also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), it divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be split up in a way that does not directly reflect the computer's hardware. VPS will at times be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however, virtualization may be chosen for varying reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container from one server to another. Users might have root access to their own virtual space. Clients are often responsible for patching and maintaining the server (unmanaged server) or the VPS provider may supply server admin tasks for the client (managed server).
Dedicated Hosting Service
The client gets their own website server and gets 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 usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user 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 customer gets his or her own web server but is not allowed complete control over the server (the client is denied root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they may manage their data via FTP or other remote management software. The client is not permitted complete control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not giving the client to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically doesn't own the server. The server is leased to the customer.
Colocation Website Hosting Service
Almost the same as the dedicated website hosting service, but the customer owns the colocation server; the hosting organization supplies physical space that the computer takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and costly kind of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may offer little to no support directly for their user's machine, providing only the electrical, internet access, and storage facilities for the computer. In most cases for colocation, the client would have his own administrator go to the data center on-site to do any hardware upgrades or changes. Formerly, many colocation providers would allow any computer configuration for hosting, even ones housed in desktop-style minitower cases, but most hosts now demand rack mount enclosures and standard system configurations.
Cloud Hosting
This is a new type of hosting platform that allows clients strong, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud-hosted website might be more stable than others as other computers in the cloud can compensate when an individual piece of hardware breaks. Furthermore, 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 bill users only for resources used by the user, rather than a flat rate for the amount the customer guesses they may use, or a fixed amount upfront hardware investment. Alternatively, the lack of centralization may give clients less control on where their data 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 improved resource utilization. Clustered servers are a sturdy solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or customizing a scalable website hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually web 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 variation of distributed hosting is when a server cluster performs like a grid and is made of multiple nodes.
Home Server
Typically, a sole machine situated in a private residence can be used to host one or a few websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines 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 client's connection and by refusing to offer static IP addresses. A easy way to attain 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 supplied by website 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 might 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 website 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 website is publicly accessible 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 when there is a network outage. A hosting provider's Service Level Agreement (SLA) may include a certain amount of scheduled downtime per year in order to perform maintenance on the systems. 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 system drops below that in the signed SLA, a hosting provider at times will supply a partial refund for time lost. How downtime is calculated is different from provider to provider, therefore going through the SLA is important. Not all providers show uptime information. 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 per year.
Obtaining Hosting
Website hosting is sometimes supplied as part of a general internet access plan from ISPs. There are also a lot 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. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based website 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 may want to have other services, such as email for their organization domain, databases or multimedia services. A client might also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, but the user may also use ASP.NET or ASP Classic. Web hosting packages generally include a website content management system, so the end-user does not have to be bothered about the more technical components.
Security
Since website hosting services host websites belonging to their clients, web security is an extreme issue. When a client agrees to use a website hosting service, they are handing over control of the security of their website to the service provider that is hosting the website. The degree of security that a web hosting service offers is extremely important to a prospective client and can be a major item when considering which provider a client may choose.
Web hosting server can be targeted by malicious users in various ways, including uploading malware or malicious code onto a hosted site. These attacks {may|might| be done for various reasons, including stealing credit card data, launching a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or spamming.